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2Ct)e HitiersfiDe Eliterature Series; 



JOHNSON AND GOLDSMITH 



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INTRODUCTION. 

There can be little doubt that Lord Macaulay is the 
most popular writer of English prose that this century has 
produced. Thousands of copies of his History of England 
are still sold every year, and travellers tell us that if an 
Australian settler possesses three books only, the first two 
will be the Bible and Shakespeare, and the third, Macau- 
lay's Essays. And yet his authority as a critic and histo- 
rian has been shaken, and his capacity as a poet — for his 
Lays of Ancient Rome is a very pojmlar book — seriously 
questioned. Nor is his popularity confined to any one circle 
of readers. Cultivated men and women in their conversa- 
tion and writings assume a knowledge of his works as a 
matter of course, but the intelligent laboring man, who is 
striving for an education, is equally, perhaps more, familiar 
with them. It is plain that a writer who makes such a 
wide and lasting appeal deserves careful study, and that 
a brief survey of his life cannot be without interest. 

Thomas Babington Macaulay was born October 25, 1800, 
at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire. His father Zachary 
was a Scotchman of probity and talents, who was a dis- 
tinguished promoter of abolition. Macaulay, therefore, 
came honestly by the middle-class virtues and defects that 
are so salient in his character. He was a precocious, nay 
rather a wonderful child, but does not appear to have been 
spoiled. His memory was prodigious and his reading enor- 
mous, while his faculty for turning out hundreds of re- 
spectable verses was simply phenomenal. After a happy 
period of schooling he entered Cambridge, where he won 
prizes for verse, and made a reputation for himself as a 
scholar and speaker, but failed of the highest honors on 



IV MAC A UL AY. 

account of his inaptitude for mathematics. He graduated 
at twenty-two, was elected a Fellow of Trinity two years 
later, and the next year startled the world by his brilliant 
essay on Milton in the Edijihurgh Review. From this time 
his career was one of almost unbroken success. He was 
called to the bar in 1826, but gave more time to his writing 
and to his political aspirations than to his profession. In 
1830 he was elected to the House of Commons through the 
patronage of Lord Lansdowne, and began his career as a 
staunch Whig at one of the most important crises in Eng- 
lish history, — that of the first Reform Bill. 

It is quite plain that if Macaulay had taken seriously to 
politics at this juncture he would have made a name for 
himself among English statesmen, or at least among Eng- 
lish orators. The speeches he delivered were enthusias- 
tically received, he stood high with the ministers of a party 
just coming into power, he had the courage of his convic- 
tions, he had the wide erudition that has been a tradition 
with English statesmen, and he had the practical ability to 
conduct a political canvass (for the new borough of Leeds) ; 
but he liked the adulation of society a little too well, and his 
income was not sufficient to let him bide his time. Dinners 
at Holland House and breakfasts with Rogers were delight- 
ful, no doubt, as delightful as the letters in which he de- 
scribed them to his favorite sister Hannah ; and so too was 
the praise he got for his articles in the Edinburgh ; but this 
devotion to society and literature could hardly have been 
kept up along with an entirely serious and absorbing pur- 
suit of political honors. He was probably well advised, 
therefore, when in 1834 he accepted the presidency of a new 
law commission for India and a membership of the Supreme 
Council of Calcutta. It meant banishment, but it meant 
also a princely income of which half could be saved. So 
he set out, taking his sister Hannah with him, for he was a 
bachelor, discharged his duties admirably, and returned to 
England in 1838. 



INTBODUCTION. V 

On his return he reentered Parliament and served with 
distinction but not with consjiicuous success. His genius 
had been diverted and his desires were more than ever 
divided. He obtained a seat in Lord John Russell's cabinet 
and supported the Whigs on all great questions, but he was 
better known as the author of the Lays of Ancient Rome 
(1842) and the Essays. He lost his seat for Edinburgh in 
1847, having been too outspoken and liberal in his views, 
yet this meant little to one who was a student by nature 
and who was about to bring out the first two volumes of the 
most popular history ever written (1849). The remaining 
decade of his life was practically the only period in which his 
energies were undivided. He was indeed reelected to Par- 
liament from Edinburgh without his solicitation, and he was 
raised to the peerage in 1857, being the first man to receive 
such an honor mainly for literary work ; but he did little be- 
sides labor on his History and make notable contributions 
to the EncyclopcBdia Britannica. Other honors of various 
sorts were showered on him and his fame reached the pro- 
portions of Byron's, but his health began to fail and he did 
not live long enough to experience any reaction. He died of 
heart trouble on December 28, 1859, in the fulness of his 
intellectual powers, and leaving his great history incomplete. 

The chief reasons for Macaulay's tremendous popularity 
are not far to seek. He possessed a style which whether 
metallic, as has been claimed, or not, is at all times clear 
and strenuous. He simply commanded attention by his 
positive assurance of statement, and, when once he had ob- 
tained it, took care not to lose it through any obscurity. 
Rather than indulge in qualifications that might embarrass 
the reader, he chose, it may be unconsciously, to state half 
truths as whole truths, and to play the advocate while posing 
as the critic. The world has always loved the man who 
knows his own mind, and Macaulay knew his and pro- 
claimed the fact loudly. Then again the world has always 
loved the strong man who is not too far aloof from it to 



VI MA CAUL AY. 

hold many of its prejudices and opinions. This was just 
the case with Macaulay, who was little more than a middle- 
class Englishman with vastly magnified powers. Subtlety 
of intellect and delicacy of taste were as far from him as 
they have always been from a majority of his countrymen, 
but dogmatic assurance and opthnistic confidence in what- 
ever was English were his in full measure. The very quali- 
ties that made Tennyson for a long time eclipse Browning 
made Macaulay eclipse Carlyle, and in both cases a nat- 
ural reaction set in. Critics called attention to the artifi- 
cial balance of Macaulay's sentences, and to the brazen ring 
of his verses ; they pointed out his blindness to much that 
is highest and pm^est in literature ; they convicted him of 
partisanship and made short work of his assumptions of 
omniscience. In all this they had considerable truth on 
their side, but as was natural they went to extremes, and 
the pendulum of opinion is now swinging in Macaulay's 
direction again. Mr. Matthew Arnold was right when he 
insisted on Macaulay's middle-class limitations, but he went 
too far Avhen he practically denied that Macaulay had any 
claim to the title of poet. Schoolboys and older readers 
have not been entirely deluded when they have been car- 
ried away by the swing of Ivri/ and of Iloratius. The 
essay on Milton has done good to thousands of readers, 
though its critical value is slight in the extreme. The third 
chapter of the History/, describing the England of 1685, 
remains one of the most brilliant pieces of historical narra- 
tion ever penned, no matter how partisan Macaulay may 
have been in the remainder of the work. However much 
his assumptions of omniscience may vex us, we must per- 
force admit that no modern specialist has ever known his 
peculiar subject better than Macaulay knew his chosen 
period of history, the reigns of James II. and William III. 
Theorize as much as we will about the pellucid beauties of 
an unelaborated style, we must confess that if the object of 
writing be to reach and influence men, Macaulay's balanced, 



INTRODUCTION. vii 

antithetical style is one of the most perfect instruments of 
expression ever made use of by speaker or writer. We 
may complain that Macaulay often leaves his subject and 
wanders off into space, but we have to confess with Mr. 
Saintsbury that he is one of the greatest stimulators of 
other minds that ever lived. In short we must conclude 
that although the brilliant historian and essayist has no 
such claim to our veneration as a great poet like Words- 
worth, or a great novelist like Scott, or a great prophet like 
Carlyle, nevertheless his place is with the honored names of 
literature, and his fame is no proper subject for carping 
and ungenerous criticism. 

With regard now to his individual works the highest 
praise must of course be given to his Historij. In spite of 
its incompleteness and its partisan character it is plainly one 
of the most notable of the world's historical compositions. 
It yields to the great work of Gibbon, but it would be hard 
to name any other history in English that is its superior in 
what is after all the essential point, the art of narration. 
Macaulay claimed that his favorite Addison might have 
written a great novel, but the claim might better be made 
for Macaulay himself, since he was a born story teller. 
Unkind critics have intimated that he drew upon his imagi- 
nation for his characters, and the public has always con- 
fessed that the History is as interesting as a novel. We 
shall not, however, go so far as to maintain that the His- 
tory is a novel or that Lord Macaulay was a great novelist 
spoiled ; but we are at liberty to contend that the great 
secret of the historian's success lay in his comprehension of 
the fact that to make the past really live it must be treated 
in much the same way in which a novelist would treat the 
materials gathered for his story. 

Perhaps enough has been said about our author's scanty 
poetry, which appeals chiefly through its swing and vigor, 
but the Essays will naturally demand somewhat fuller 
treatment. Their main value lies probably in the stimula- 
tion they give to the intellectual powers of any reader who 



viii MACAULAY. 

has a spark of literary appreciation or the slightest desire 
to learn. Macaulay's erudition is so great and he wears it 
so lightly that one is instinctively led to wish for a similar 
mental equipment, and to fancy that it cannot be very diffi- 
cult of attainment. Whatever Macaulay likes is described 
in such alluring terms that a reader feels that it would 
really be too bad for him not to know more about it. The 
truth of this statement is amusingly illustrated by an anec- 
dote, given in the Life and Letters, of a gentleman who 
after reading the review of Bunyan's Filgrhn^s Progress 
sent a servant after the book. Macaulay was sitting near 
him in the library of the Athenaeum Club and enjoyed the 
incident. But, besides their alluring style and their power 
of mental stimulation, the Essays have the advantage of 
treating in the main great subjects that peojjle wish to know 
about, and treating them in such a way as to impart a large 
amount of compact and very useful information. Perhaps 
this is the chief reason why men who are self-educated are 
so familiar with Macaulay. Such readers care very little 
for the nicer shadings of criticism, but they do care a great 
deal to have available information and positive opinions 
furnished them on the great men and events of the past. 
Hence Macaulay's essay on Bacon will survive the monu- 
mental answer that Mr. Sjjedding gave it ; hence his essays 
on Clive and Warren Hastings will for generations supply 
the public with all the Indian history it is likely to demand. 
After the Milton Macaulay wrote about forty essays, all 
of wliich appeared in the Edinburgh excejit the five con- 
tributed to the Encyclojpcedia Britannica. They fall into 
two main classes, literary and historical, with a few of 
miscellaneous character, such as that on Sadler's Law of 
Popidation. It is a striking proof of Macaulay's genius 
that they are nearly all as well worth reading to-day as 
they were when they appeared between the yellow and blue 
covers. As a rule a review is unreadable a few years after 
its appearance, as is proved by the dust that settles upon 
the volumes of such contemporaries of Macaulay's as Mack- 



INTRODUCTION. ix 

intosli and Talfourd. Their reviews were duly collected 
into volumes and they were included with Macaulay among 
the " British Essayists," but they are dead while Macaulay 
lives. The quarterlies are still published, and their pon- 
derous reviews are read by leisurely people, and immedi- 
ately forgotten, for there is no form of literature that has 
less vitality. Yet Macaulay's reviews are still read by thou- 
sands and keep alive the names of books and men that 
would else have long since perished. It is a remarkable 
literary phenomenon. While Macaulay did not originate 
the discursive literary review, he first gave it life and popu- 
larity, and may be compared to a trunk that puts forth 
many branches. But the branches are all dead or dying, 
while the trunk seems to be endowed with perpetual life 
and vigor. Explain it as we may, the fact remains that 
the essays on Clive and Pitt and Warren Hastings, on Mil- 
ton and Addison and Johnson, on Barere and Mr. Robert 
Montgomery's Poems, although belonging by nature to the 
most ephemeral category of literature, are as fully entitled 
to be called classics as any compositions written in the Eng- 
lish language during the present century. 

Four of the best of these classical essays form the basis 
of this collection, and a careful study of them with the aid 
of the introductions and notes will initiate the student into 
much of the secret of Macaulay's power and charm. He 
should not, however, rest content with them, but should 
read at least most of the Essays and the poems, and should 
then go on to complete the five volumes of the History. 
Even then he will not have all of Macaulay, for the two 
delightful volumes of the Life and Letters, edited by Mr. 
Trevelyan, will remain to be enjoyed. Mr. Cotter Mori- 
son's excellent biography in the English Men of Letters 
will also be found worth perusing, and if a good analysis of 
the style of the great essayist be wanted, it can be had in a 
chapter of Professor Minto's well known Manual of Eng- 
lish Prose Literature, 



PREFATORY NOTE. 

The Essay on Johnson, like those on Goldsmith and Bunjan, 
first appeared in the eighth edition of the Encyclopcedia Bri- 
tannica and is still to be found there. The editors of the new- 
edition were wise in retaining what is not only in all probability 
the best of Macaulay's essays, but also one of the finest biograph- 
ical sketches in any language. The praise which Macaulay gave 
perhaps too generously to Johnson's Life of Richard Savage 
should really be reserved for his own masterly account of the 
great Doctor's life and writings. One might almost bestow 
upon it the praise he gave to Boswell's Life, if compositions of 
essentially different kinds could, be profitably compared. The 
secret of Macaulay's success is not far to seek, however much 
one may despair of equalling his performance. He knew his 
subject thoroughly and sympathized with him, and, as Matthew 
Arnold said, was for the nineteenth very much the sort of man 
that Dr. Johnson was for the eighteenth century. In addition 
his limited space kept him from being too discursive, and his 
years of practice enabled him to give to his style a precision and 
strength and pliability that, in the Essays at least, it had not 
hitherto attained. Both in substance and in form, then, this 
miniature biography, for such it is, represents Macaulay at his 
very best. It is needless to say more of it and it is equally need- 
less to discuss Dr. Johnson when Macaulay has practically said 
the last word about him. Industrious editors like Dr. Birk- 
beck Hill will continue to annotate Boswell and to bring small 
facts to light, but if they are wise they will not obscure the 
full-sized portrait that the inquisitive little Scotchman painted. 
Criticism of Johnson's works and an endeavor to give them 
greater currency is, of course, another matter, and such volumes 
as Matthew Arnold's selected Lives of the Poets may be thor- 
oughly recommended. Complete editions of Johnson's works 
are not often published, but copies of existing editions are easily 
obtained, and Rasselas, at least, is to be had in almost any form. 



2 MA CAUL AY. 

The latest modern lives are by Mr. Leslie Stephen in the Eng- 
lish Men of Letters and by Colonel Grant in the Great Writers. 
For a more explicit study of points in the essay, the reader 
will find Woodrow Wilson's The State, Hallam's Literature of 
Europe, Gosse's History of English Literature in the Eighteenth 
Century, and Lord Mahon's History of England under Queen 
Anne convenient books of reference. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 



Samuel Johnson, one of the most eminent Eng- 
lish writers of the eighteenth century, was the son of 
Michael Johnson, who was, at the beginning of that 
century, a magistrate of Lichfield, and a bookseller 
of great note in the midland counties. Michael's 
abilities and attainments seem to have been consider- 
able. He was so well acquainted with the contents 
of the volumes which he exposed to sale, that the 
country rectors ^ of Staffordshire and Worcestershire 
thought him an oracle on points of learning. Be- 
tween him and the clergy, indeed, there was a strong 
religious and political sympathy. He was a zealous 
churchman, and, though he had qualified himself for 
municipal office by taking the oaths to the sovereigns 
in possession, was to the last a Jacobite in heart. At 
his house, a house which is still pointed out to every 
traveller who visits Lichfield, Samuel was born on the 
18th of September, 1709. In the child, the physical, 
intellectual, and moral ^peculiarities which afterwards 
distinguished the man were plainly discernible, — 
great muscular strength accompanied by much awk- 
wardness and many infirmities; great quickness of 
parts, 2 with a morbid propensity to sloth and procras- 

^ Country rectors were often marvellously ignorant in those 
days and earlier. See in Fielding's Joseph Andrews tlie charac- 
ter of Parson Trulliber. 

^ That is, of mental endowments. 



4 MACAULAY. 

tination; a kind and generous heart, with a gloomy 
and irritable temper. He had inherited from his 
ancestors a scrofulous taint, which it was beyond the 
power of medicine to remove. His parents were weak 
enough to believe that the royal touch was a specific 
for this malady. In his third year he was taken up 
to London, inspected by the court surgeon, prayed 
over by the court chajDlains, and stroked and pre- 
sented with a piece of gold by Queen Anne. One of 
his earliest recollections was that of a stately lady in 
a diamond stomacher and a long black hood. Her 
hand was applied in vain. The boy's features, which 
were originally noble and not irregular, were dis- 
torted by his malady. His cheeks were deeply 
scarred. He lost for a time the sight of one eye, and 
he saw but very imj^erfectly with the other. But the 
force of his mind overcame every impediment. Indo- 
lent as he was, he acquired knowledge with such ease 
and rapidity that at every school to which he was 
sent he was^ soon the best scholar. From sixteen 
to eighteen he resided at home, and was left to his 
own devices. He learned much at this time, though 
his studies were without guidance and without plan. 
He ransacked his father's shelves, dipped into a mul- 
titude of books, read what was interesting and passed 
over what was dull. An ordinary lad would have 
acquired little or no useful knowledge in such a way, 
but much that was dull to ordinary lads was interest- 
ing to Samuel. He read little Greek, for his profi- 
ciency in that language was not such that he could 
take much pleasure in the masters of Attic poetry 
and eloquence. But he had left school a good Lat- 
inist, and he soon acquired, in the large and miscel- 
laneous library of which he now had the command, 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 5 

an extensive knowledge of Latin literature. That 
Augustan delicacy of taste which is the boast of the 
great public schools ^ of England he never possessed. 
But he was early familiar with some classical writers 
who were quite unknown to the best scholars in the 
sixth form at Eton. He was peculiarly attracted by 
the works of the great restorers of learning.'^ Once, 
while searching for some apples, he found a huge 
folio volume of Petrarch's works. The name excited 
his curiosity, and he eagerly devoured hundreds of 
pages. Indeed, the diction and versification of his 
own Latin compositions show that he had paid at 
least as much attention to modern copies from the 
antique as to the original models. 

While he was thus irregularly educating himself, 
his family was sinking into hopeless poverty. Old 
Michael Johnson was much better qualified to pore 
upon books, and to talk about them, than to trade in 
them. His business declined; his debts increased; 
it was with difficulty that the daily expenses of his 
household were defrayed. It was out of his power 
to support his son at either university,^ but a wealthy 
neighbor offered assistance, and, in reliance on prom- 
ises which proved to be of very little value, Samuel 
was entered at Pembroke College, Oxford. When 
the young scholar presented himself to the rulers of 

^ That is, schools like Rugby, Eton, and Harrow, which are not 
" public " in the American sense, but are supported by endow- 
ments and fees. 

2 That is, the leaders of the Renaissance, Petrarch, Erasmus, 
Sir Thomas More, Colet, etc. 

3 There were only two universities then in England, Oxford 
and Cambridge, and in popular opinion there are only two now, 
though London, Durham, and Victoria have bepn ^dded within 
the present century. 



6 MA CAUL AY. 

that society,^ they were amazed not more by his un- 
gainly figure and eccentric manners than by the quan- 
tity of extensive and curious information which he 
had picked up during many months of desultory but 
not unprofitable study. On the first day of his resi- 
dence, he surprised his teachers by quoting Macro- 
bins; 2 and one of the most learned among them 
declared that he had never known a freshman of 
equal attainments. 

At Oxford, Johnson resided during about three 
years. He was poor, even to raggedness; and his 
appearance excited a mirth and a pity which were 
equally intolerable to his haughty s]3irit. He was 
driven from the quadrangle of Christ Church by the 
sneering looks which the members of that aristo- 
cratical society cast at the holes in his shoes. Some 
charitable person placed a new pair at his door, but 
he spurned them away in a fury. Distress made 
him, not servile, but reckless and ungovernable. No 
opulent gentleman commoner,^ panting for one and 
twenty, could have treated the academical authorities 
with more gToss disrespect. The needy scholar was 
generally to be seen under the gate of Pembroke, a 
gate now adorned with his effigy,* haranguing a circle 
of lads, over whom, in spite of his tattered gown and 

^ An English college is an endowed and incorporated associa- 
tion of students. Its rulers are the Master (or Warden, etc.) 
and the fellows. 

2 Died 415 A. D., author of a miscellaneous collection of 
antiquarian and critical pieces entitled Saturnalia, but best known 
for his commentary on the famous Scipio's Dream of Cicero. 

8 One paying all charges and not dependent on the college 
funds for support. 

■* Pembroke (founded 1624) has had many other distinguished 
sous — e. g, Shenstone, Blackstone, and Whitefield. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 7 

dirty linen, his wit and audacity gave him an undis- 
puted ascendency.- i -In every mutiny against the dis- 
cipline of the college, he was the ringleader. Much 
was pardoned, however, to a youth so highly distin- 
guished by abilities and acquirements. He had early 
made himself known by turning Pope's ^'Messiah "^ 
into Latin verse. The style and rhythm, indeed, were 
not exactly Yirgilian ; but the translation found many 
admirers, and was read with pleasure by Pope him- 
self. 

The time drew near at which Johnson would, in 
the ordinary course of things, have become a bach- 
elor of arts; but he was at the end of his resources. 
Those promises of support on which he had relied had 
not been kej^t. His family could do nothing for him. 
His debts to Oxford tradesmen were small indeed, 
yet larger than he could pay. In the autumn of 1731 
he was under the necessity of quitting the univer- 
sity without a degree. In the following winter his 
father died. The old man left but a pittance, and 
of that pittance almost the whole was appropriated 
to the support of his widow. The property to which 
Samuel succeeded amounted to no more than twenty 
pounds. 

His life during the thirty years which followed 
was one hard struggle with j^overty. The misery of 
that struggle needed no aggravation, but was aggra- 
vated by the sufferings of an unsound body and an 
unsound mind. Before the young man left the uni- 

^ This poem, first publislied in The Spectator for May 14, 1712, 
was ill imitation of Virgil's Pollio (Eclogue IV.), and is one of 
the best of Pope's early works. The concluding lines have fur- 
nished us with one of the most familiar of modern hymns : — 
" Rise, crowned with light, imperial Salem, rise ! " 



8 MACAULAY. 

versity, his hereditary malady had broken forth in a 
singularly cruel form. He had become an incurable 
hypochondriac. He said long after that he had been 
mad all his life, or at least not perfectly sane; and, 
in truth, eccentricities less strange than his have often 
been thought, grounds sufficient for absolving felons 
and for setting aside wills. His grimaces, his ges- 
tures, his mutterings, sometimes diverted and some- 
times terrified people who did not know him. At a 
dinner table he would, in a fit of absence, stoop down 
and twitch off a lady's shoe. He would amaze a 
drawing-room by suddenly ejaculating a clause of the 
Lord's Prayer. He would conceive an unintelligible 
aversion to a particular alley, and perform a great 
circuit rather than see the hateful place. He would 
set his heart on touching every post in the streets 
through which he walked. If by any chance he 
missed a post, he would go back a hundred yards 
and repair the omission. Under the influence of his 
,^ disease, his senses became morbidlv torpid and his 
imagination morbidl y active. At one time he would 
stand poring on the town clock without being able to 
tell the hour. At another he would distinctly hear 
his mother, who was many miles off, calling him by 
his name. But this was not the worst. A deep mel- 
ancholy took possession of him, and gave a dark tinge 
to all his views of human nature and of human des- 
tiny. Such wretchedness as he endured has driven 
many men to shoot themselves or drown themselves. 
But he was under no temptation to commit suicide. 
He was sick of life, but he was afraid of death ; and 
he shuddered at every sight or sound which reminded 
him of the inevitable hour. In religion he found but 
little comfort during his long and frequent fits of 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 9 

dejection, for his religion partook of his own charac- 
ter. The light from heaven shone on him indeed, 
but not in a direct line, or with its own pure splen- 
dor. The rays had to struggle through a disturbing 
medium: they reached him refracted, dulled, and 
discolored by the thick gloom which had settled on 
his soul ; and, though they might be sufficiently clear 
to guide him, were too dim to cheer him. 

With such infirmities of body and of mind, this 
celebrated man was left, at two and twenty, to fight 
his way through the world. He remained during 
about five years in the midland counties. At Lich- 
field, his birthplace and his early home, he had in- 
herited some friends and acquired others. He was 
kindly noticed by Henry Hervey,^ a gay officer of 
noble family, who happened to be quartered there. 
Gilbert Walmesley,^ registrar of the ecclesiastical 
court of the diocese, — a man of distinguished parts, 
learning, and knowledge of the world, — did himself -^ 
honor by patronizing the young adventurer, whose t^^^ 
repulsive person, unpolished manners, and squalid 
garb moved many of the petty aristocracy of the 
neighborhood to laughter or to disgust. At Lich- 
field, however, Johnson could find no way of earning 
a livelihood. He became usher of a grammar school^ 
in Leicestershire; he resided as a humble companion 
in the house of a country gentleman ; ^ but a life of 

1 Born in 1700 ; brother of Lord John Herve3\ 

2 (1680-1751). At the end of his Life of the poet Edmund 
Smith, Johnson paid a noble tribute to this early friend. 

^ That is, assistant master in a school in which Latin and 
Greek were the chief studies. The school was that of Market 
Bosworth. He became usher in July, 1732. 

* Sir Wolstan Dixie, patron of the school. 



/ 



^ 



10 MACAULAY. 

dependence was insupportable to his haughty spirit. 
He repaired to Birmingham, and there earned a few 
guineas by literary drudgery. In that town he 
printed a translation, little noticed at the time and 
long forgotten, of a Latin book about Abyssinia.^ 
He then put forth proposals for publishing by sub- 
scription the poems of Politian,^ with notes containing 
a history of modern Latin verse; but subscriptions 
did not come in, and the volume never appeared. 

While leading this vagrant and miserable life, 
Johnson fell in love. The object of his passion was 
Mrs. Elizabeth Porter, a widow who had children 
as old as himself. To ordinary spectators, the lady 
appeared to be a short, fat, coarse woman, painted 
half an inch thick, dressed in gaudy colors, and fond 
of exhibiting provincial airs and graces which were 
not exactly those of the Queensberrys and Lepels.^ 
To Johnson, however, whose passions were strong, 
whose eyesight was too weak to distinguish ceruse 
from natural bloom, and who had seldom or never 
been in the same room with a wo man of real fashion, 
his Titty, as he called her, was the most beautiful, 
graceful, and accomplished of her sex. That his ad- 
miration was unfeigned cannot be doubted, for she 
was as poor as himself. She accepted, with a readi- 
ness which did her little honor, the addresses of a 

^ This was not a Latin book, but a French translation of a 
work by Lobo (1593-1678), a Portuguese Jesuit. 

2 Politlan (Angelo Ambrogini, 1454-1494) was one of the 
most brilliant scholars and teachers of the Renaissance. He not 
only succeeded in Latin verse, but was also an able Italian poet. 

^ Mary Lepel (1700-1768), who married Lord John Hervey, 
author of the Memoirs of the Court of George II., and Catherine 
Hyde (died 1777), afterwards Duchess of Queensberry, were 
noted beauties of the period, and friends of Pope and Gay. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 11 

suitor who might have been her son. The marriage, 
however, in spite of occasional wrangiings, proved 
happier than might have been exj^ected. The lover 
continued to be under the illusions of the wedding 
day till the lady died, in her sixty -fourth year. On 
her monument he placed an inscription extolling the 
charms of her person and of her manners; and when, 
long after her decease, he had occasion to mention 
her, he exclaimed, with a tenderness half ludicrous, 
half pathetic, "Pretty creature! " 

His marriage made it necessary for him to exert 
himself more strenuously than he had hitherto done.^ 
He took a house in the neighborhood of his native 
town, and advertised for pupils.^ But eighteen 
months passed away, and only three pupils came to 
his academ}^ Indeed, his appearance was so strange, 
and his temper so violent, that his schoolroom must 
have resembled an ogre's den. Nor was the tawdry, 
painted grandmother whom he called his Titty well 
qualified to make provision for the comfort of young 
gentlemen. David Garrick,^ who was one of the 
pupils, used many years later to throw the best com- 
pany of London into convulsions of laughter by mim- 
icking the endearments of this extraordinary pair. 

At length Johnson, in the twenty-eighth year of 
his age, determined to seek his fortune in the capital 
as a literary adventurer. He set out with a few 

^ The marriage was performed July 9, 1735, at Derby, though 
Mrs. Porter Uved at Birmingham, to which place Johnson had 
returned, 

2 In 1736. 

^ The great actor (1716-1779), from whom man}^ of the un- 
pleasing details about Mrs. Porter were, as Macaulay intimates, 
obtained by Boswell. 



12 • MA CAUL AY. 

guineas, three acts of the tragedy of "Irene" in 
manuscript, and two or three letters of introduction 
from his friend Wahnesley. 

Never since literature became a calling in England 
had it been a less gainful calling than at the time 
when Johnson took up his residence in London. In 
the preceding generation,^ a writer of eminent merit 
was sure to be munificently rewarded by the govern- 
ment. The least that he could expect was a pension 
or a sinecure place; and, if he showed any aptitude 
for politics, he might hope to be a member of Parlia- 
ment, a lord of the treasury, an ambassador, a secre- 
tary of state. 2 It would be easy, on the other hand, 
to name several writers ^ of the nineteenth century, of 
whom the least successful has received forty thousand 
pounds from the booksellers. But Johnson entered 
on his vocation in the most dreary part of the dreary 
interval which separated two ages of prosperity. Lit- 
erature had ceasecl to flourish under the patronage 
of the great, and had not begun to flourish under the 
patronage of the public. One man of letters, indeed, 
Pope, had acquired by his pen what was then consid- 
ered as a handsome fortune, and lived on a footing 
of equality with nobles and ministers of state. But 
this was a solitary exception. Even an author whose 
reputation was established, and whose works were pop- 
ular — such an author as Thomson,* whose "Seasons " 

1 That is, the reigns of William III. ancU Anne. See the 
essay on Addison, 

2 With regard to literary men who rose in politics, the stu- 
dent shonld remember that Steele was a member of Parliament, 
Prior an ambassador, and Addison a secretary of state. 

^ For example, Scott, Byron, Macanlay. 

* For James Thomson, the poet (1700-1748) and Henry Field- 
ing (1707-1754), the great novelist, see Gosse. Fielding's early 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 13 

were in every library; siicli an author as Fielding, 
whose "Pasquin" had had a greater run tlian any 
drama since the "Beggar's Opera " ^ — was some- 
times glad to obtain, by pawning his best coat, the 
means of dining on tripe at a cookshop underground, 
where he could wipe his hands, after his greasy meal, 
on the back of a Newfoundland dog. It is easy, there- 
fore, to imagine what humiliations and privations must 
have awaited the novice who had still to earn a name. 
One of the publishers to whom Johnson applied for 
employment measured with a scornful eye that athletic 
though uncouth frame, and exclaimed, "You had 
better get a porter's knot ^ and carry trunks." Nor 
was the advice bad, for a porter was likely to be as 
plentifully fed and as comfortably lodged as a poet. 

Some time appears to have elapsed before Johnson 
was able to form any literary connection from which 
he could expect more than bread for the day which 
was passing over him. He never *forgot the gener- 
osity with which Hervey, who was now residing in 
London, relieved his wants during this time of trial. 
"Harry Hervey," said the old philosoj^her many 
years later, "was a vicious man, but he was very 
kind to me. If you call a dog Hervey, I shall love 
him." At Hervey 's table, Johnson sometimes enjoyed 

work was as a dramatist, but none of his plays, including the 
satiric comedy mentioned, is read to-day, except possibly his 
Tragedy of Tragedies, a parody which celebrates Tom Thumb. 

1 A famous parody on the Italian opera, written by John Gay 
(1685-1732) on a hint from Swift. It was produced in 1728, 
and had an immense run, its chief characters representing higli- 
waymen and pickpockets. For Gay, whose Fables and Black- 
eyed Susan are still read, and who was a delightful man, see 
Gosse. 

^ A pad worn on the head. 



14 MA CAUL AY. 

feasts which were made more agreeable by contrast. 
But in general he dined, and thought that he dined 
well, on sixpennyworth of meat and a pennyworth 
of bread at an alehouse near Drury Lane.^ 

The effect of the privations and sufferings which 
he endured at this time was discernible to the last in 
his temper and his deportment. His manners had 
never been courtly. They now became almost sav- 
age. Being frequently under the necessity of wearing 
shabby coats and dirty shirts, he became a confirmed 
sloven. Being often very hungry when he sat down 
to his meals, he contracted a habit of eating with 
ravenous greediness. Even to the end of his life, 
and even at the tables of the great, the sight of food 
affected him as it affects wild beasts and birds of 
prey. His taste in cookery, formed in subterranean 
ordinaries^ and cda?node beef shops, ^ was far from 
delicate. Whenever he was so fortunate as to have 
near him a hare "that had been kept too long, or a 
meat pie made with rancid butter, he gorged himself 
with such violence that his veins swelled and the 
moisture broke out on his forehead. The affronts 
which his poverty emboldened stupid and low-minded 
men to offer to him, would have broken a mean spirit 
into sycophancy, but made him rude even to fero- 
city. Unhappily, the insolence which, while it was 
defensive, was pardonable and in some sense respect- 

^ A famous street (not then or now aristocratic) in the heart 
of London. The student may consult books by Hare, Loftie, 
and Sir Walter Besant, in order to learn something about historic 
London. 

2 Eating houses, where a fixed rate is charged for meals. 

^ Where beef a la mode (i. e., larded with spices, vegetables, 
wine, etc.) was sold. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 15 

able, accompanied him into societies where he was 
treated with courtesy and kindness. He was repeat- 
edly provoked into striking those who had taken 
liberties with him. All the sufferers, however, were 
wise enough to abstain from talking about their beat- 
ings, except Osborne, the most rapacious and brutal 
of booksellers, who proclaimed everywhere that he 
had been knocked down by the huge fellow whom he 
had hired to puff the Harleian Library.^ 

About a year after Johnson had begun to reside in 
London, he was fortunate enough to obtain regular 
employment from Cave,^ an enterprising and intelli- 
gent bookseller, who was proprietor and editor of "The 
Gentleman's Magazine." That journal, just entering 
on the ninth year of its long existence, was the only 
periodical work in the kingdom which then had what 
would now be called a large circulation. It was, 
indeed, the chief source of parliamentary intelligence. 
It was not then safe, even during a recess, to publish 
an account of the proceedings of either House without 
some disguise. Cave, however, ventured to entertain 
his readers with what he called "Reports of the De- 
bates of the Senate of Lilliput."^ France was Ble- 
fuscu; London was Mildendo; pounds were sprugs; 

^ A famous collection of books and manuscripts made by Rob- 
ert Harley, Earl of Oxford (1661-1724), the rival of Marlbor- 
ough and Godolphin, and bought by Osborne, who hired Dr. 
Johnson to assist in cataloguing it. 

2 Edward Cave (1691-1754), under the name of " Sylvanus 
Urban," founded, in 1731, The Gentleman's Magazine (which is 
still running, though changed in plan, and the back volumes of 
which are a mine of miscellaneous information). Johnson wrote 
a good Latin ode to him, and a short sketch of him. 

^ This and the following queer names are taken from Gulli- 
ver^ s Travels. For an account of how news was circulated at this 
period, and earlier, see Macaulay's History, chap. iii. 



16 MACAULAY. 

the Duke of Newcastle ^ was the Nardac secretary of 
state ; Lord Hardwicke was the Hugo Hickrad ; and 
William Pulteney was Wingul Pulnub. To write 
the speeches was, during several years, the business 
of Johnson. He was generally furnished with notes 

— meao^re indeed and inaccurate — of what had been 
said; but sometimes he had to find argument and elo- 
quence, both for the ministry and for the opposition. 
He was himself a Tory, not from rational conviction, 

— for his serious opinion was, that one form of gov- 
ernment was just as good or as bad as another, — but 
from mere passion, such as inflamed the Capulets 
against the Montagues,^ or the Blues of the Roman 
circus against the Greens.^ In his infancy he had 
heard so much talk about the villanies of the Whigs 
and the dangers of the Church, that he had become 
a furious partisan when he could scarcely speak. 
Before he was three, he had insisted on being taken 
to hear Sacheverell* preach at Lichfield Cathedral, 

1 Thomas Pelham. For this fatuous statesman (1693-1768) 
see Macaulay's essays on Pitt and Chatham. Philip Yorke, 
Earl of Hardwicke (1690-1764), was a famous Lord Chancellor. 
William Pulteney, Earl of Bath (1682 ?-1764), was a leader of 
a Whig faction against Walpole. 

2 See Romeo and Juliet. 

3 See Gibbon's Decline and Fall, chap. xl. The drivers in the 
Roman circus wore liveries, — white, red, green, and blue, — 
and the populace took sides according to colors. Many riots 
resulted, and the feuds were transferred to Constantinople, 
where the great Nika riots of 532 a. d. took place. 

4 The Rev. Dr. Henry Sacheverell (1672-1724) was a foolish 
High Churchman, who in 1709 preached two sermons of an 
intemperate character against the Whigs. He was impeached, 
tried by the Peers, and found guilty, with the natural result that 
he became a hero with the Tories, and had not a little to do 
with the Whig downfall. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 17 

and liad listened to the sermon with as much re- 
spect, and probably with as much intelligence, as any- 
Staff ordshire squire in the congregation. The work 
which had been begun in the nursery had been com- 
pleted by the university. Oxford, when Johnson 
resided there, was the most elacobitical place in Eng- 
land; and Pembroke was one of the most Jacobitical 
colleges in Oxford. The prejudices which he brought 
up to London were scarcely less absurd than those of 
his own Tom Tempest.^ Charles II. and James II. 
were two of the best kings that ever reigned. Laud, 
a poor creature who never did, said, or wrote any- 
thing indicating more than the ordinary capacity of 
an old woman, was a prodigy of parts and learning, 
over whose tomb Art and Genius ^ still continued to 
weep. Hampden ^ deserved no more honorable name 
than that of "the zealot of rebellion." Even the 
ship money, condemned not less decidedly by Falk- 
land * and Clarendon ^ than by the bitterest Round- 
heads, Johnson would not pronounce to have been an 
unconstitutional impost. Under a government the 
mildest that had ever been known in the world, under 
a government which allowed to the people an unpre- 
cedented liberty of speech and action, he fancied that 
he was a slave ; he assailed the ministry with obloquy 

^ See Johnson's Idler, No. 10. 

2 See The Vanity of Human Wishes, 1. 173. 

^ John Hampden (1594-1643), the famous Puritan states- 
man, who resisted the ship-money tax, and was killed in a skir- 
mish with the Royalists. 

^ Lucius Gary, Viscount Falkland (1610?-1643), poet, scholar, 
and one of the noblest of Charles I.'s adherents. See Matthew- 
Arnold's essay on him. 

^ The great Lord Chancellor and historian. 



18 MACAULAY. 

which refuted itself, and regretted the lost freedom 
find happiness of those golden days in which a writer 
who had taken but one tenth part of the license al- 
lowed to him would have been pilloried, mangled with 
the shears, whipped at the cart's tail,^ and flung into 
a noisome dungeon to die. He hated dissenters and 
stockjobbers, the excise and the army, septennial par- 
liaments, and continental connections. ^ He long had 
an aversion to the Scotch, — an aversion of which he 
could not remember the commencement, but which, 
he owned, had probably originated in his abhorrence 
of the conduct of the nation during the Great Rebel- 
lion. It is easy to guess in what manner debates on 
great party questions were likely to be reported by 
a man whose judgment was so much disordered by 
party spirit. A show of fairness was, indeed, neces- 
sary to the prosperity of the magazine. But Johnson 
long afterwards owned that, though he had saved 
appearances, he had taken care that the Whig dogs 
should not have the best of it; and, in fact, every 
passage which has lived, every passage which bears 
the marks of his higher faculties, is put into the 
mouth of some member of the opposition. ^ 

A few weeks after Johnson had entered on these 
obscure labors, he published a work which at once 
placed him high among the writers of his age. It is 

^ Obsolete methods of punishment. 

2 All objects of Tory invective. Dissenters, of course, were op- 
posed to the church; stockjobbers to the landed interests; the ex- 
cise vi^as favored by Walpole ; the army was due to William III. ; 
limiting the duration of Parliament (to seven years) was a Whig 
measure ; connections with foreign countries, especially with Hol- 
land, formed a part of Whig policy, — though Johnson would 
have done well to remember the Treaty of Dover. 

3 That is, the Tories, the party out of power. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 19 

probable that what he had suffered during his first 
year in London had often reminded him of some 
parts of that noble poem in which Juvenal^ had de- 
scribed the misery and degradation of a needy man 
of letters, lodged among the pigeons' nests in the tot- 
tering garrets which overhung the streets of Rome. 
Pope's admirable imitations of Horace's "Satires" 
and "Epistles" had recently appeared, were in every 
hand, and were by many readers thought superior to 
the originals. What Pope had done for Horace, John- 
son aspired to do for Juvenal. The enterprise was 
bold, and yet judicious. For between Johnson and 
Juvenal there was much in common, ^ — much more, 
certainly, than between Pope and Horace. 

Johnson's "London" appeared without his name in 
May, 1738. He received only ten guineas for this 
stately and vigorous poem; but the sale was rapid 
and the success complete. A second edition was re- 
quired within a week. Those small critics who are 
always desirous to lower established reputations ran 
about proclaiming that the anonymous satirist was 
superior to Pope in Pope's own peculiar department 
of literature. It ought to be remembered, to the 
honor of Pope, that he joined heartily in the applause 
with which the appearance of a rival genius was wel- 
comed. He made inquiries about the author of "Lon- 
don." Such a man, he said, could not long be con- 
cealed. The name was soon discovered; and Pope, 
with great kindness, exerted himself to obtain an 
academical degree, and the mastership of a grammar 

1 Juvenal's third satire is meant. Dryden had translated it, 
along with four others, and Oldham had applied it to London 
as Boileau had done to Paris. 

2 For example, a certain severity of temper and morals. 



20 MACAULAY. 

school, for the poor young poet. The at ,;;i..p* raiLd, 
and Johnson remained a bookseller's hack 

It does not appear that these two m the; iiiost 

eminent writer of the generation whi , vas go-ing 
out, and the most eminent writer of the generation 
which was coming in — ever saw each -Uicr. Tliey 
lived in very different circles, — one surrounded by 
dukes and earls, the other by starving pamphleteers 
and index-makers. Among Johnson's associates at 
this time may be mentioned Boyse,^ who, when his 
shirts were pledged, scrawled Latin verses, sitting up 
in bed with his arms through two holes in his blan- 
kets, who composed very respectable sacred poetry 
when he was sober, and who was at last run over by 
a hackney coach when he was drunk; Hoole,^ sur- 
named the metaphysical tailor, who, instead of attend- 
ing to his measures, used to trace geometrical dia- 
grams on the board where he sat cross-legged; and 
the penitent impostor, George Psalmanazar,^ who, 
after poring all day, in a humble lodging, on the 
folios of Jewish rabbis and Christian fathers, in- 
dulged himself at night with literary and theological 
conversation at an alehouse in the city. But the 
most remarkable of the persons with whom at this 
time Johnson consorted was Richard Savage,^ an 

1 Samuel Boyse (1708-1749). 

2 Uncle of John Hoole, the translator of Tasso and Ariosto, 
who was also a friend of Johnson. 

2 The famous impostor (1679 ?-1763), who pretended to be a 
native of Formosa, and wrote an account of that island which 
imposed on a great many people. He was born in France, but 
kept his real name concealed. 

^ (1698-1743), reputed to be the illegitimate son of the Coun- 
tess of Macclesfield. He was a poet interesting rather as fore- 
shadowing future tendencies of English verse than as writing 



1 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 21 

earl's son, a shoemaker's apprentice, who had seen 
life in all its forms, who had feasted among blue rib- 
bands in St. James's Square,^ and had lain with fifty 
poi lids' weight of irons on his legs in the condemned 
ward of Newgate. ^ This man had, after many vicis- 
situdes of fortune, sunk at last into abject and hope- 
less poverty. His pen had failed him. His patrons 
had been taken away by death, or estranged by the 
riotous profusion with which he squandered their 
bounty, and the ungrateful insolence with which he 
rejected their advice. He now lived by begging. He 
dined on venison and champagne whenever he had 
been so fortunate as to borrow a guinea. If his 
questing had been unsuccessful, he appeased the rage 
of hunger with some scraps of broken meat, and lay 
down to rest under the piazza of Covent Garden ^ in 
warm weather, and in cold weather as near as he 
could get to the furnace of a glasshouse.* Yet, in his 
misery, he was still an agreeable companion. He 
had an inexhaustible store of anecdotes about that 
gay and brilliant world from which he was now an out- 
cast. He had observed the great men of both parties 
in hours of careless relaxation, had seen the leaders 
of opposition without the mask of patriotism, and had 
heard the prime minister ^ roar with laughter and tell 

anything worth the general reader's attention. But the student 
should by all means read Johnson's Life of him. 

1 That is, with Knights of the Garter, in one of the most aris- 
tocratic quarters of London. 

2 The noted prison. 

2 Originally " Convent " Garden, best known through its mar- 
ket and theatre. 

^ Probably a conservatory, though the word is also used for 
" glass-works." 

^ Sir Robert Walpole. 



22 MACAULAY. 

stories not over-decent. During some months, Sav- 
age lived in the closest familiarity with Johnson ; and 
then the friends parted, not without tears. Johnson 
remained in London to drudge for Cave. Savage 
went to the west of England, lived there as he had 
lived everywhere, and in 1743 died, penniless and 
heart-broken, in Bristol jail. 

Soon after his death, while the public curiosity was 
strongly excited about his extraordinary character 
and his not less extraordinary adventures, a life of 
him ajDpeared, widely different from the catchpenny 
lives of eminent men which were then a staple article 
of manufacture in Grub Street.^ The style was, in- 
deed, deficient in ease and variety; and the writer 
was evidently too partial to the Latin element of our 
language. But the little work, with all its faults, 
was a masterpiece. No finer sj^ecimen of literary 
biography 2 existed in any language, living or dead; 
and a discerning critic might have confidently pre- 
dicted that the author was destined to be the founder 
of a new school of English eloquence. 

The Life of Savage was anonymous, but it was 
well known in literary circles that Johnson was the 
writer. During the three years which followed, he 
produced no important work ; but he was not, and 
indeed could not be, idle. The fame of his abilities 
and learning continued to grow. Warburton^ pro- 

^ A street *' much inhabited by writers of small histories, 
dictionaries, and temporary poems ; whence any mean produc- 
tion is called grubstreet.^' Johnson's Dictionary. 

2 Does this mean a biography considered as a piece of litera- 
ture, or a biography of a literary person ? If the former, the 
praise will seem extravagant to those who admire the Agricolh 
of Tacitus. 

^ The famous William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester, 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 23 

nounced him a man of parts and genius, and the 
praise of Warburton was then no light thing. Such 
was Johnson's reputation that in 1747 several emi- 
nent booksellers combined to employ him in the ardu- 
ous work of preparing a " Dictionary of the English 
Language," in two folio volumes. The sum which 
they agreed to pay him was only fifteen hundred guin- 
eas, and out of this sum he had to pay several poor 
men of letters who assisted him in the humbler parts 
of his task. 

The Prospectus of the Dictionary he addressed to 
the Earl of Chesterfield.^ Chesterfield had long been 
celebrated for the politeness of his manners, the bril- 
liancy of his wit, and the delicacy of his taste. He 
was acknowledged to be the finest speaker in the 
House of Lords. He had recently governed Ireland, 
at a momentous conjuncture,^ with eminent firmness, 
wisdom, and humanity; and he had since become 
secretary of state. He received Johnson's homage 
with the most winning affability, and requited it with 
a few guineas, bestowed, doubtless, in a very grace- 
ful manner, but was by no means desirous to see all 
his carpets blackened with the London mud, and his 

(1698-1779), a noted controversialist and dogmatic critic whose 
reputation, immense during his lifetime, has dwindled almost to 
nothing. 

1 The Earl of Chesterfield (Philip Dormer Stanhope, 1694- 
1773) is chiefly renowned as a man of fashion, and as the author 
of a series of Letters to his son which is still a classic manual 
of conduct. Johnson remarked of this famous book that it 
taught the morals of a courtesan and the manners of a dancing- 
master. Chesterfield was an accomplished dij)lomat, and fore- 
saw the coming of the French Revolution. 

^ As Lord Lieutenant about 1745. He kept down factious and 
bribery, and established schools and manufactories. 



24 MA CAUL AY. 

soups and wines thrown to right and left over the 
gowns of fine ladies and the waistcoats of fine gen- 
tlemen, by an absent, awkward scholar, who gave 
strange starts and uttered strange growls, — who 
dressed like a scarecrow and ate like a cormorant. 
Durino; some time Johnson continued to call on his 
patron,^ but, after being repeatedly told by the porter 
that his lordship was not at home, took the hint, and 
ceased to present himself at the inhospitable door. 

Johnson had flattered himself that he should have 
completed his Dictionary by the end of 1750, but it 
was not till 1755 that he at length gave his huge vol- 
umes to the world. During the seven years which 
he passed in the drudgery of penning definitions and 
marking quotations for transcription, he sought for 
relaxation in literary labor of a more agreeable kind. 
In 1749 he published "The Vanity of Human Wishes," 
an excellent imitation of the Tenth Satire of Juvenal. 
It is in truth not easy to say whether the palm be- 
longs to the ancient or to the modern poet. The 
couplets 2 in which the fall of Wolsey is described, 
though lofty and sonorous, are feeble when compared 
with the wonderful lines which bring before us all 

^ Down to the time of Pope, and later, the patron, a nohle- 
man or other disting-uished personage who would pay for the 
honor of a dedication, was necessary to the author, and was 
celebrated with a flattery that seems loathsome to us now. For- 
tunately, the growth of a reading public has relieved authors 
from this shameful necessity, a consummation toward which 
the stand taken by Pope and Johnson led the way. 

^ Lines 99-128. The student will do well to compare with 
the Latin original (11. .56-80), and with the famous passage in 
Shakespeare's Henry VIII. Both London and The Vanity of 
Human Wishes are given with useful annotation in Hales's Longer 
English Poems. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 25 

Rome ill tumult on the day of the fall of Sejanus;i 
the laurels on the doorposts; the white bull stalking- 
towards the Capitol; the statues rolling down from 
their pedestals ; the flatterers of the disgraced minister 
running to see him dragged with a hook through the 
streets, and to have a kick at his carcass before it is 
hurled into the Tiber. It must be owned, too, that 
in the concluding passage the Christian moralist has 
not made tlie most of his advantages, and has fallen 
decidedly short of the sublimity of his Pagan model. 
On the other hand, Juvenal's Hannibal must yield 
to Johnson's Charles; ^ and Johnson's vigorous and 
pathetic enumeration of the miseries of a literary life ^ 
must be allowed to be superior to Juvenal's lamenta- 
tion over the fate of Demosthenes and Cicero. 

For the copyright of " The Vanity of Human 
Wishes " Johnson received only fifteen guineas. 

A few days after the publication of this poem, his 
tragedy, begun many years before, was brought on 
the stage. His pupil, David Garrick, had in 1741 
made his appearance on a humble stage in Goodman's 
Fields,* had at once risen to the first place among 
actors, and was now, after several years of almost 
uninterrupted success, manager of Drury Lane The- 

1 The infamous minister of the Emperor Tiberius, whose fate 
had previously given Ben Jonson the subject for a tragedy. See 
Capes's Earhj Roman Empire in the Epochs series. Macaulay is 
paraphrasing Juvenal. 

2 That is, the great Charles XII. of Sweden. 

3 " Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol." 

The Vanity of Human Wishes, I. 160. 

Johnson's satires have furnished several familiar quotations, 
and are strong, though by no means great poems. 
* Near the Tower. 



26 MACAULAY. 

atre.-^ The relation between him and his old precep- 
tor was of a very singular kind. They repelled each 
other strongly, and yet attracted each other strongly. 
Nature had made them of very different cla}^ and 
circumstances had fully brought out the natural pecu- 
liarities of both. Sudden prosperity had turned Gar- 
rick's head. Continued adversity had soured John- 
son's temper. Johnson saw, with more envy than 
became so great a man, the villa, the plate, the 
china, the Brussels carpet, which the little mimic had 
got by repeating, with grimaces and gesticulations, 
what wiser men had written; and the exquisitely sen- 
sitive vanity of Garrick was galled by the thought 
that, while all the rest of the world was applauding 
him, he could obtain from one morose cynic, whose 
opinion it was impossible to despise, scarcely any 
compliment not acidulated with scorn. Yet the two 
Lichfield men had so many early recollections in com- 
mon, and sympathized with each other on so many 
points on which they sympathized with nobody else 
in the vast j^opulation of the capital, that though the 
master was often provoked by the monkey-like im- 
pertinence of the pupil, and the j^npil by the bearish 
rudeness of the master, they remained friends till 
they were parted by death. Garrick now brought 
"Irene" out, with alterations sufficient to displease 
the author, yet not sufficient to make the piece pleas- 
ing to the audience. The public, however, listened, 
with little emotion but with much civility, to five 
acts of monotonous declamation. After nine repre- 
sentations, the play was withdrawn. It is, indeed, 

^ Drury Lane Theatre was opened in 1674 with an address by 
Dryden. It has been several times rebuilt and is still used — 
chiefly for pantomimes. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 27 

altogether vmsuited to the stage, and, even when 
perused in the closet, will IJe found hardly worthy of 
the author. He had not the slightest notion of what 
blank verse should be. A change in the last syllable 
of every other line would make the versification of 
"The Vanity of Human Wishes" closely resemble 
the versification of "Irene." ^ The poet, however, 
cleared by his benefit nights, ^ and by the sale of the 
copja-ight of his tragedy, about three hundred pounds, 
then a great sum in his estimation.^ 

About a year after the representation of "Irene," 
he began to publish a series of short essays on morals, 
manners, and literature. This species of composition 
had been brought into fashion by the success of " The 
Tatler," and by the still more brilliant success of 
"The Spectator."* A crowd of small writers had 
vainly attempted to rival Addison. "The Lay Mon- 

^ The subject of Johnson's tragedy is the passion of the Sul- 
tan Mahomet (the Great) for a beautiful Greek slave, Irene. 
Macaulay's criticism seems eminently just. The student need 
not be a master of the technicalities of blank verse in order to 
feel that Johnson could not write it ; a feeling which will be 
strengthened by a perusal of the papers on Milton's versification 
contributed to The Rambler. 

2 The author seems to have received the profits of every 
tliird night's performance. See Boswell, who gives many in- 
teresting details about the performance. Johnson took his disap- 
pointment philosophically. 

^ Maeaulay naturally has little more to say about Johnson as 
a poet. The Doctor's greatness did not lie that way, but his two 
satires, his elegy on Levet (^ee post), and one or two epitaphs 
and impromptus should be read by the serious student. Of the 
Latin poems the lines to Cave are excellent, and the version of 
Pope's Messiah is good. 

^ See the essay on Addison, also Gosse, and, better still, read 
selections from both papers, which originated in the fertile brain 
of Steele, but were made classical by Addison. 



28 MA CAUL AY. 

astery," "The Censor," "The Freethmker," "The 
Plam Dealer," "The Champion," ^ and other works of 
the same kind, had had their short day. None of them 
had obtained a permanent place in our literature; 
and they are now to he found only in the libraries of 
the curious. At length Johnson undertook the ad- 
venture in which so many aspirants had failed. In 
the thirty-sixth year after the appearance of the last 
number of "The Spectator," appeared the first num- 
ber of "The Rambler." 2 From March, 1750, to 
March, 1752, this paper continued to come out every 
Tuesday and Saturday. 

From the first, "The Rambler " was enthusiastically 
admired by a few eminent men. Richardson,^ when 
only five numbers had appeared, pronounced it equal, 
if not superior, to "The Spectator." Young and 
Hartley expressed their approbation not less warmly. 
Bubb Dodington ^ — among whose many faults indif - 

1 The Lay Monastery ran from Nov. 16, 1713, to Feb. 15, 
1714, under the direction of Sir Richard Blackmore and Mr. 
Hughes. The Censor, three voUimes, appeared in 1717 under 

"Lewis Theobakl, the Shakespearean critic. The Freethinker ran 
for 159 numbers, Mar. 24, 1718, to Sept. 28, 1719, under 
Ambrose Philips. The Plain Dealer ran for 117 numbers. Mar. 
27, 1724, to May 7, 1725, under Aaron Hill. The Champion, two 
volumes, appeared in 1741, and was directed by no less a person- 
age than Henry Fielding. 

2 Johnson with his accustomed piety composed a special prayer 
for success on this occasion. The exact dates of the paper are 
Tuesday, March 20, 1750, to Saturday, March 14, 1752, — 208 
numbers, all but about five of which were by Johnson. 

^ Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), practically the first English 
novelist, author of Pamela, etc. Johnson preferred him to 
his younger rival. Fielding. Richardson himself wrote No. 97 
of The Ramhler. 

^ The famous author of Night-Thoughts, Dr. Edward Young 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 29 

f erence to the claims of genius and learning cannot be 
reckoned — solicited the acquaintance of the writer. 
In consequence, probably, of the good offices of Dod- 
ington, who was then the confidential adviser of 
Prince Frederick, two of his Royal Highness's gen- 
tlemen carried a gracious message to the printing- 
office, and ordered seven copies for Leicester House. ^ 
But these overtures seem to have been very coldly 
received. Johnson had had enough of the patronage 
of the great to last him all his life, and was not dis- 
posed to haunt any other door as he had haunted the 
door of Chesterfield. 

By the public "The Rambler" was at first very 
coldly received. Though the price of a number was 
only twopence, the sale did not amount to five hun- 
dred. The profits were therefore very small. But 
as soon as the flying leaves Avere collected and re- 
printed, they became poj^ular. The author lived to 
see thirteen thousand copies spread over England 
alone. Separate editions were published for the 
Scotch and Irish markets. A large party pronounced 
the style perfect, -^ so absolutely j^erfect that in some 
essays it would be impossible for the writer himself 
to alter a single word for the better. Another party, 
not less numerous, vehemently accused him of hav- 
ing corrupted the purity of the English tongue. The 
best critics admitted that his diction was too monot- 



(1681-1765), David Hartley (1705-1757), the metaphysician, 
and George Bubb Dodington (Lord Melcombe, 1691-1762), a 
much talked of, and not very highly esteemed, courtier whom 
Browning has made the subject of one of his Parleyings. 

1 The residence of the Prince of Wales, who quarreled with 
his father, George II. Frederick (1707-1751) was the father of 
George III. 



30 macaulay: 

onous, too obviously artificial, and now and then 
turgid even to absurdity. But they did justice to the 
acuteness of his observations on morals and manners, 
to the constant precision and frequent brilliancy of 
his language, to the weighty and magnificent eloquence 
of many serious passages, and to the solemn yet pleas- 
ing humor of some of the lighter papers. On the 
question of precedence between Addison and Johnson, 
— a question which, seventy years ago, was much 
disputed, — posterity has pronounced a decision from 
which there is no appeal. Sir Roger, his chaplain 
and his butler, Will Wimble and Will Honeycomb, 
the Vision of Mirza, the Journal of the Retired Citi- 
zen, the Everlasting Club, the Dunmow Flitch, the 
Loves of Hilpah and Shalum, the Visit to the Ex- 
change, and the Visit to the Abbey, are known to 
everybody.^ But many men and women, even of 
highly cultivated minds, are unacquainted with 
Squire Bluster and Mrs. Busy, Quisquilius and Ve- 
nustulus, the Allegory of Wit and Learning, the 
Chronicle of the Revolutions of a Garret, and the sad 
fate of Anningait and Ajut. 

The last " Rambler " was written in a sad and 
gloomy hour. Mrs. Johnson had been given over by 
the physicians. Three days later she died. She left 
her husband almost broken-hearted. Many people 
had been surprised to see a man of his genius and 
learning stooping to every drudgery, and denying 
himself almost every comfort, for the purpose of sup- 
plying a silly, affected old woman with superfluities, 
which she accepted with but little gratitude. But 

1 " Dunmow Flitch " is Macaulay's own and not entirely 
accurate title for Nos. 607, 608 of The Spectator, which are not 
certainly by Addison. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 31 

all his affection had been concentrated on her. He 
had neither brother nor sister, neither son nor daugh- 
ter. To him she was beautiful as the Gunnings,^ and 
witty as Lady Mary.^ Her opinion of his writings 
was more important to him than the voice of the pit 
of Drury Lane Theatre, or the judgment of " The 
Monthly Review." The chief support which had 
sustained him through the most arduous labor of his 
life was the hope that she would enjoy the fame and 
the profit which he anticipated from his Dictionary. 
She was gone ; and in that vast labyrinth of streets, 
peopled by eight hundred thousand human beings, 
he was alone. Yet it was necessary for him to set 
himself, as he expressed it, doggedly to work. After 
three more laborious years, the Dictionary was at 
length complete. 

It had been generally supposed that this great work 
would be dedicated to the eloquent and accomplished 
nobleman to whom the Prospectus had been ad- 
dressed. He well knew the value of such a com- 
pliment; and therefore, when the day of publication 
drew near, he exerted himself to soothe, by a show of 
zealous and at the same time of delicate and judicious 
kindness, the pride which he had so cruelly wounded. 
Since the "Ramblers" had ceased to appear, the 
town had been entertained by a journal called "The 

1 Elizabeth (1734-1790) and Maria Gunning (1733-1760) 
were famous beauties, afterwards the Duchess of Hamilton and 
Countess of Coventry respectively. 

2 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762), known to Pope 
and his set as " Lady Mary," was a small poetess better known 
for her wit and her talents as a letter writer. She originated 
the famous characterization of Pope as " the wicked wasp of 
Twickenham." She also introduced inoculation into Europe. 



32 MACAULAY. 

World," to which many men of high rank and fash- 
ion contributed.^ In two successive numbers of ^'The 
World " the Dictionary was, to use the modern 
phrase, puffed with wonderful skill. The writings of 
Johnson were warmly praised. It was proposed that 
he should be invested with the authority of a dictator, 
nay, of a pope, over our language, and that his deci- 
sions about the meaning and the spelling of words 
should be received as final. His two folios, it was 
said, would of course be bought by everybody who 
could afford to buy them. It was soon known that 
these papers were written by Chesterfield. But the 
just resentment of Johnson was not to be so appeased. 
In a letter 2 written with singular energy and dig- 
nity of thought and language, he repelled the tardy 
advances of his patron. The Dictionary came forth 
without a dedication. In the preface the author truly 
declared that he owed nothing to the great, and de- 
scribed the difficulties with which he had been left to 
struggle so forcibly and pathetically that the ablest 
and most malevolent of all the enemies of his fame. 
Home Tooke,^ never could read that passage without 
tears. 

The public, on this occasion, did Johnson full jus- 
tice, and something more than justice. The best 

1 Edited by Edward Moore (1712-1757), a forgotten poet. 
Chesterfield and Horace Walpole wrote for it, and it ran from 
Jan. 4, 1753, to Dec. 30, 1756 (209 numbers). 

2 See Boswell for this justly famous letter. 

3 John Home (1736-1812), who subsequently added the name 
Tooke, is famous as a politician tried for high treason but 
acquitted, as a philologist whose Diversions of Purley is still 
read, and as a conversationalist who rivaled Johnson himself. 
The passage over which he wept is the concluding paragraph of 
the Preface. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 33 

lexicographer may well be content if his productions 
are received by the world with cold esteem. But 
Johnson's Dictionary was hailed with an enthusiasm 
such as no similar work has ever excited. It was, 
indeed, the first dictionary which could be read with 
pleasure. The definitions show so much acuteness of 
thought and command of language, and the passages 
quoted from poets, divines, and philosophers are so 
skilfully selected, that a leisure hour may always be 
very agreeably spent in turning over the pages. ^ The 
faults of the book resolve themselves, for the most 
part, into one great fault. Johnson was a wretched 
etymologist. He knew little or nothing of any Teu- 
tonic language except English, which, indeed, as he 
wrote it, was scarcely a Teutonic language ; and thus 
he was absolutely at the mercy of Junius and Skin- 
ner.^ 

The Dictionary, though it raised Johnson's fame, 
added nothing to his pecuniary means. The fifteen 
hundred guineas which the booksellers had agreed to 
pay him had been advanced and spent before the last 
sheets issued from the press. It is painful to relate 
that, twice in the course of the year which followed 

^ Some of the definitions are famous for their humor ; in 
others Johnson showed his political bias, e. g., Lexicographer ^ 
a harmless drudge, and Excise, a hateful tax. 

2 Francis Junius (1589-1677, of Huguenot extraction) and 
Stephen Skinner (1623-1667) were scholars who studied the 
Teutonic languages {i. e., Grothic, German, Scandinavian, Eng- 
lish, etc.) at a time when little was known of them. Junius is 
especially entitled to praise for his work in Anglo-Saxon. 
Macaulay's criticism is just, but Johnson, in consideration of 
the general ignorance with regard to etymology, should not be 
unduly censured. See Bos well for an amusing account of the 
Doctor's methods of work. 



34 MACAULAY. 

the publication of this great work, he was arrested 
and carried to sponging-houses, and that he was twice 
indebted for his liberty to his excellent friend Rich- 
ardson. It was still necessary for the man who had 
been formally saluted by the highest authority as dic- 
tator of the English language to supply his wants by 
constant toil. He abridged his Dictionary. He pro- 
posed to bring out an edition of Shakespeare by sub- 
scription, and many subscribers sent in their names, 
and laid down their money; but he soon found the 
task so little to his taste that he turned to more at- 
tractive employments. He contributed many papers 
to a new monthly journal which was called " The 
Literary Magazine."^ Few of these papers have 
much interest, but among them was the very best 
thing that he ever wrote, a masterpiece both of rea- 
soning and of satirical pleasantry, the review of 
Jenyns's^ "Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of 
Evil." 

In the spring of 1758 Johnson put forth the first 
of a series of essays entitled "The Idler." During 
two years these essays continued to aj^pear weekly. 
They were eagerly read, widely circulated, and, in- 
deed, impudently pirated while they were still in the 
original form, and had a large sale when collected 
into volumes. "The Idler" may be described as a 
second j^art of "The Rambler," somewhat livelier and 
somewhat weaker than the first part.^ 

1 Founded in 1756, and lasted about three years, chiefly on 
Johnson's reputation. 

2 Soame Jenyns (1704-1787), a small poet, member of Parlia- 
ment, and author of the above-named book, the style of which 
was much admired. 

8 The first number appeared Saturday, April 15, 1758; the 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 35 

While Johnson was busied with his "Idlers," his 
mother, who had accomplished her ninetieth year, 
died at Lichfield. It was long since he had seen her; 
but he had not failed to contribute largely, out of his 
small means, to her comfort. In order to defray the 
charges of her funeral, and to pay some debts which 
she had left, he wrote a little book in a single week, 
and sent off the sheets to the press without reading 
them over. A hundred pounds were paid him for 
the copyright; and the purchasers had great cause 
to be pleased with their bargain, for the book was 
"Rasselas."! 

The success of "Rasselas" was great, though such 
ladies as Miss Lydia Languish ^ must have been 
grievously disappointed when they found that the new 
volume from the circulating library was little more 
than a dissertation on the author's favorite theme, 
the vanity of human wishes ; that the Prince of Abys- 
sinia was without a mistress, and the princess without 
a lover; and that the story set the hero and the hero- 
ine down exactly where it had taken them up. The 
style was the subject of much eager controversy. "The 
Monthly Eeview " and " The Critical Review " ^ took 

103d and last appeared Saturday, April 5, 1760. Jolinson 
wrote all except perhaps twelve. The increased liveliness may 
even be seen in the fictitious names, which are no longer Latin 
as in The Rambler, but homely English, — such as Dick Linger, 
Betty Broom, and Deborah Ginger. Between The Rambler and 
The Idler Johnson wrote twenty-nine papers for The Adventurer 
of his friend, Dr. Hawkesworth, — so that, all told, he wrote 
nearly two hundred and twenty-five essays. 

1 Rasselas, or the Prince of Abyssinia (1759) is the best known 
of Johnson's prose works after the Lives of the Poets. 

2 A well-known character in Sheridan's Rivals. 

8 Set up by the Tories in 1756, under the editorship of Smol- 
lett, as a rival to the Monthly (1749), which was Whig. 



36 MAC A UL AY. 

different sides. Many readers pronounced the writer 
a pompous pedant, who would never use a word of 
two syllables where it was possible to use a word of 
six, and who could not make a waiting-woman relate 
her adventures without balancing every noun with 
another noun and every epithet with another epithet. 
Another party, not less zealous, cited with delight 
numerous passages in which weighty meaning was 
expressed with accuracy and illustrated with splen- 
dor. And both the censure and the praise were 
merited. 

About the plan of "Rasselas" little was said by 
the critics, and yet the faults of the plan might seem 
to invite severe criticism. Johnson has frequently 
blamed Shakespeare for neglecting the proprieties of 
time and place, and for ascribing to one age or nation 
the manners and opinions of another. Yet Shake- 
speare has not sinned in this way more grievously 
than Johnson. Rasselas and Imlac, Nekayah and 
Pekuah, are evidently meant to be Abyssinian s of 
the eighteenth century, for the Europe which Imlac 
describes is the Europe of the eighteenth century; 
and the inmates of the Happy Valley talk familiarly 
of that law of gravitation which Newton discovered, 
and which was not fully received, even at Cambridge,^ 
till the eighteenth century. What a real company of 
Abyssinians would have been may be learned from 
Bruce's^ "Travels." But Johnson, not content with 

^ Newton was a Cambridge man, and that university has been 
famous for mathematics, hence the use of " even." 

2 James Bruce (1730-94), the celebrated African traveler, 
whose Travels appeared in 1790 in five quarto volumes. The 
student v;iil recall Johnson's early interest in the Abyssinians and 
^■a tir.nslation of Lobo. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 37 

turning filthy savages, ignorant of their letters and 
gorged with raw steaks cut from living cows, into 
philosophers as eloquent and enlightened as himself 
or his friend Burke, and into ladies as highly ac- 
complished as Mrs. Lennox ^ or Mrs. Sheridan,^ 
transferred the whole domestic system of England to 
Egypt. Into a land of harems, a land of polygamy, 
a land where women are married without ever being 
seen, he introduced the flirtations and jealousies of 
our ball-rooms. In a land where there is boundless 
liberty of divorce, wedlock is described as the indis- 
soluble compact. ".A youth and maiden meeting by 
chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange 
glances, reciprocate civilities, go home and dream of 
each other. Such," says Kasselas, "is the common 
process of marriage." Such it may have been, and 
may still be, in London, but assuredly not at Cairo. 
A writer who was guilty of such improprieties had 
little right to blame the poet who made Hector quote 
Aristotle, and represented Julio Romano as flourish- 
ing in the days of the oracle of Delphi. ^ 

By such exertions as have been described, Johnson 

1 Mrs. Charlotte Lennox (1720-1804) was the author of The 
Female Quixote, a novel of some vogue, and a woman for whom 
Johnson seems to have had considerable respect. 

2 Mrs. Frances Sheridan (1724-1766), the mother of the great 
dramatist and author of two novels. 

3 See Troilus and Cressida, II. ii., and A Winter's Tale, V. ii. 
Giulio Romano (1492-1546) was a distinguished Italian painter, 
a pupil of Raphael's. Macaulay's criticism of Rasselas is just 
in the main, but in spite of all its faults the story, like many 
another classic, retains a hold upon readers through the general 
appeal of its central theme and the soundness of its ethical 
content. Still Johnson was a moralist rather than a story- 
teller, though he actually tried his hand on a fairy tale {The 
Fountains). 



38 MACAULAY. 

supported himself till the year 1762. In that year 
a great change in his circumstances took place. He 
had from a child been an enemy of the reigning dy- 
nasty. His Jacobite prejudices had been exhibited 
with little disguise both in his works and in his con- 
versation. Even in his massy and elaborate Diction- 
ary, he had, with a strange want of taste and judg- 
ment, inserted bitter and contumelious reflections on 
the Whig party. The excise, which was a favorite 
resource of Whig financiers, he had designated as a 
hateful tax. He had railed against the commissioners 
of excise in language so coarse that they had seri- 
ously thought of prosecuting him. He had with diffi- 
culty been prevented from holding up the lord privy 
seal ^ by name as an example of the meaning of the 
word "renegade." A pension he had defined as pay 
given to a state hireling to betray his country; a 
pensioner, as a slave of state hired by a stipend to 
obey a master. It seemed unlikely that the author 
of these definitions would himself be pensioned. But 
that was a time of wonders. George III. had as- 
cended the throne, 2 and had, in the course of a few 
months, disgusted many of the old friends, and con- 
ciliated many of the old enemies, of his house. The 
city was becoming mutinous. Oxford was becoming- 
loyal.^ Cavendishes and Bentincks were murmuring. 

1 The keeper of the seal affixed to less important documents 
and to grants that are afterwards to pass under the great seal 
(kept by the Lord Chancellor). The lord privy seal is a mem- 
ber of the cabinet with little work to do. The keeper referred 
to was Lord Gower, whom Johnson regarded as a renegade be- 
cause he gave up the Jacobite party. 

2 In 1760. 

3 That is, to the Hanoverians. It has always been loyal, and 
clung to the Stuarts as long as possible. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 39 

Somersets and Wyndliams ^ were hastening to kiss 
hands. The head of the treasury was now Lord 
Bute, 2 who was a Tory, and could have no objection 
to Johnson's Toryism. Bute wished to be thought 
a patron of men of letters, and Johnson was one of 
the most eminent and one of the most needy men 
of letters in Europe. A pension of three hundred a 
year was graciously offered, and with very little hesi- 
tation accepted. 

This event produced a change in Johnson's whole 
way of life. For the first time since his boyhood, he 
no longer felt the daily goad urging him to the daily 
toil. He was at liberty, after thirty years of anxiety 
and drudgery, to indulge his constitutional indolence, 
to lie in bed till two in the afternoon, and to sit up 
talking till four in the morning, without fearing 
either the printer's devil or the sheriff's officer. 

One laborious task, indeed, he had bound himself 
to perform. He had received large subscriptions for 
his promised edition of Shakespeare; he had lived 
on those subscriptions during some years; and he 
could not, without disgrace, omit to perform his part 
of the contract. His friends repeatedly exhorted him 
to make an effort, and he repeatedly resolved to do 
so. But, notwithstanding their exhortations and his 
resolutions, month followed month, year followed 
year, and nothing was done. He prayed fervently 
against his idleness; he determined, as often as he 
received the sacrament, that he would no longer doze 
away and trifle away his time; but the spell under 

1 Representative Whig and Tory families respectively. 

2 John Stuart, Earl of Bute (1713-1792), became premier in 
1762. For a good sketch of his incompetent administration see 
Macaulay's essay on Chatham. 



40 MAC A UL AY. 

which he lay resisted prayer and sacrament . His 
private notes at this time are made up of self- 
reproaches. ''My indolence," he wrote on Easter 
Eve in 1764, "has sunk into grosser sluggishness. A 
kind of strange oblivion has overspread me, so that 
I know not what has become of the last year." Eas- 
ter, 1765, came, and found him still in the same 
state. "My time," he wrote, "has been unprofitably 
spent, and seems as a dream that has left nothing 
behind. My memory grows confused, and I know 
not how the days pass over me."^ Happily for his 
honor, the charm which held hhn captive was at 
length broken by no gentle or friendly hand. He 
had been weak enough to pay serious attention to a 
story about a ghost which haunted a house in Cock 
Lane, 2 and had actually gone himself, with some of 
his friends, at one in the morning, to St. John's 
Church, Clerkenwell, in the hoj^e of receiving a com- 
munication from the perturbed spirit. But the 
spirit, though adjured with all solemnity, remained 
obstinately silent; and it soon appeared that a 
naughty girl of eleven had been amusing herself by 
making fools of so many philosophers. Churchill,^ 
who, confident in his powers, drunk with popularity, 
and burning with party spirit, was looking for some 
man of established fame and Tory politics to insult, 
celebrated the Cock Lane ghost in three cantos, nick- 

^ Johnson's praj^ers and meditations were collected and pub- 
lished by George Strahan in 1785. 

2 See a chapter in Andrew Lang's recent book, Cock Lane and 
Common Sense. Doctor Johnson really assisted in detecting the 
imposture, so that Macaulay is unjust to him. 

^ Charles Churchill (1731-1764), a satirist of ability, whose 
vicious life was much talked of and is still remembered against 
him. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 41 

named Johnson Pomposo, asked where the book was 
which had been so long promised and so liberally 
paid for, and directly accused the great moralist of 
cheating.^ This terrible word proved eifectual; and 
in October, 1765, appeared, after a delay of nine 
years, the new edition of Shakespeare. 

This publication saved Johnson's character for 
honesty, but added nothing to the fame of his abilities 
and learning. The preface, though it contains some 
good passages, is not in his best manner. ^ The most 
valuable notes are those in which he had an opportu- 
nity of showing how attentively he had, during many 
years, observed human life and human nature. The 
best specimen is the note on the character of Polonius.^ 
Nothing so good is to be found even in Wilhelm Meis- 
ter's^ admirable examination of Hamlet. But here 
praise must end. It would be difficult to name a 
more slovenly, a more worthless, edition of any great 
classic. The reader may turn over play after play 
without finding one happy conjectural emendation, or 
one ingenious and satisfactory explanation of a pas- 
sage which had baffled preceding commentators. 
Johnson had, in his Prospectus, told the world that 

1 Churchill's The Ghost was m four books. "Pomposo " is de- 
scribed in Book II., 11. 653-688.' In Book III., 11. 799 seq., the 
Shakespeare matter is brought in : — 

" How, for integrity renown'd, 
Which booksellers have often found, 
He for subscribers baits his hook, 
And takes their cash — but where 's the book ? " 

Doctor Johnson said of this satire that he thought Churchill a 
shallow fellow in the beginning, and had seen no reason for 
altering his opinion. 

^ This judgment will not pass unquestioned. 

^ See Hamlet. 

^ By Goethe — Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre, IV. xiii. 



42 MACAULAY. 

he was peculiarly fitted for the task which he had 
undertaken, because he had, as a lexicographer, been 
under the necessity of taking a wider view of the 
English language than any of his predecessors. That 
his knowledge of our literature was extensive, is in- 
disputable. But, unfortunately, he had altogether 
neglected that very part of our literature with which 
it is especially desirable that an editor of Shakespeare 
should be conversant. It is dangerous to assert a 
negative. Yet little will be risked by the assertioli 
that in the two folio volumes of the English Dic- 
tionary there is not a single passage quoted from 
any dramatist of the Elizabethan age except Shake- 
speare and Ben.^ Even from Ben the quotations are 
few. Johnson might easily, in a few months, have 
made himself well acquainted with every old play that 
was extant. But it never seems to have occurred to 
him that this was a necessary preparation for the 
work which he had undertaken. He would doubtless 
have admitted that it would be the height of absurd- 
ity in a man who was not familiar with the works 
of ^schylus and Euripides to publish an edition of 
Sophocles. Yet he ventured to publish an edition 
of Shakespeare without having ever in his life, as far 
as can be discovered, read a single scene of Massin- 
ger, Ford, Dekker, Webster, Marlowe, Beaumont, or 
Fletcher. His detractors were noisy and scurrilous. 
Those who most loved and honored him had little to 
say in praise of the manner in which he had dis- 
charged the duty of a commentator. He had, how- 

1 Ben Jonson (1573-1637). Macaulay practically gives a 
list of tlie chief Elizabethan dramatists (omitting Middleton, 
Peele, and one or two others), for whom the student may consult 
Saintsbury's History of Elizabethan Literature. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 43 

ever, acquitted himself of a debt which had long lain 
heavy on his conscience, and he sank back into the 
repose from which the sting of satire had roused him. 
He long continued to live upon the fame which he 
had already won. He was honored by the Univer- 
sity of Oxford with a doctor's degree,^ by the Royal 
Academy 2 with a professorship, and by the King 
with an interview, in which his Majesty most gra- 
ciously expressed a hope that so excellent a writer 
would not cease to write. '^ In the interval, however, 
between 1765 and 1775, Johnson published only two 
or three political tracts,^ the longest of which he could 
have produced in forty-eight hours, if he had worked 
as he worked on the Life of Savage and on "Ras- 
selas." 

But, though his pen was now idle, his tongue was 
active. The influence exercised by his conversation, 
directly upon those with whom he lived, and indirectly 
on the whole literary world, was altogether without 
a parallel. His colloquial talents were, indeed, of 
the highest order. He had strong sense, quick dis- 
cernment, wit, humor, immense knowledge of litera- 
ture and of life, and an infinite store of curious anec- 
dotes. As respected style, he spoke far better than 
he wrote. Every sentence which dropped from his 

1 lu 1755, just before his Dictionary was published, Oxford 
gave him an M. A. Dublin gave him the degree of LL. D. in 
1765, Oxford ten years later, 

- - The Royal Academy of Arts was founded in 1768, Sir Joshua 
Reynolds being its first president. Johnson was made Professor 
in Ancient Literature, — an honor without salary. 

3 In February, 1767, " in the library at the queen's house." 
See Boswell. 

* For example, The False Alarm ; The Patriot ; Taxation no 
Tyranny, etc. 



44 MACAULAY. 

lips was as correct in structure as the most nicely 
balanced period of "The Rambler." But in his talk 
there were no pompous triads, and little more than 
a fair proportion of words in "osity" and "ation." 
All was simplicity, ease, and vigor. He uttered his 
short, weighty, and pointed sentences with a power 
of voice and a justness and energy of emphasis of 
which the effect was rather increased than diminished 
by the rollings of his huge form, and by the asthmatic 
gaspings and puffings in which the peals of his elo- 
quence generally ended. Nor did the laziness which 
made him unwilling to sit down to his desk prevent 
him from giving instruction or entertainment orally. 
To discuss questions of taste, of learning, of casuistry, 
in language so exact and so forcible that it might 
have been printed without the alteration of a word, 
was to hun no exertion, but a pleasure. He loved, 
as he said, to fold his legs and have his talk out. 
He was ready to bestow the overflowings of his full 
mind on anybody who would start a subject, — on 
a fellow-passenger in a stage-coach, or on the person 
who sat at the same table with him in an eating- 
house. But his conversation was nowhere so brilliant 
and striking as when he was surrounded by a few 
friends ^ whose abilities and knowledge enabled them, 
as he once expressed it, to send him back every ball 
that he threw. Some of these, in 1764, formed them- 
selves into a club, 2 which gradually became a formid- 

1 It was so with Addison, See the essay on him. 

2 It met at the Turk's Head, Soho, and was called the Literary 
Club after Garrick's death. IMacaulay gives the names of all 
the original members save those of Burke's father-in-law, Dr. 
Nugent, Mr. Anthony Chamier, and Sir John Hawkins (who 
wrote a life of Johnson). The club has been continued and 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. * 45 

able power in the common wealth of letters. The 
verdicts pronounced by this conclave on new books 
were sj)eedily known over all London, and were suffi- 
cient to sell off a whole edition in a day, or to con- 
demn the sheets to the service of the trunk-maker 
and the pastry cook. Nor shall we think this strange 
when we consider what great and various talents and 
acquirements met in the little fraternity. Goldsmith 
was the representative of poetry and light literature ; 
Reynolds, of the arts; Burke, of political eloquence 
and political philosophy. There, too, were Gibbon, 
the greatest historian, and Jones, the greatest lin- 
guist, of the age. Garrick brought to the meetings 
his inexhaustible pleasantry, his incomparable mim- 
icry, and his consummate knowledge of stage effect. 
Among the most constant attendants were two high- 
born and high-bred gentlemen, closely bound together 
by friendship, but of widely different characters and 
habits, — Bennet Langton, distinguished by his skill 
in Greek literature, by the orthodoxy of his opinions, 
and by the sanctity of his life; and Topham Beau- 
clerk,^ renowned for his amours, his knowledge of 
the gay world, his fastidious taste, and his sarcastic 

Macaiilay in Trevelvan's Life and Letters gives a pleasant account 
of attending a meeting of it. It maybe noted that in 1749 John- 
son had started a elnb which contained, however, no such celeb- 
rities. The idea of the great Club came from Sir Joshua. 

1 Of this list the names of Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Reynolds 
(1723-1792), Burke, Gibbon (1737-1794), and Garrick are too 
familiar, or ought to be, to require a note. Macaulay says enough 
of Langton (1737-1801, who succeeded Johnson at the Royal 
Academy) and Beauclerk (1739-1780) ; and the student may 
look up the career of Sir William Jones (1746-1794), whose work 
as a jurist and oriental linguist is of very high importance. His 
poem What constitutes a State should also be read. 



46 » MACAULAY, 

wit. To predominate over sucli a society was not 
easy. Yet even over such a society Johnson predomi- 
nated. Burke might, indeed, have disputed the su- 
premacy to which others were under the necessity, of 
submitting. But Burke, though not generally a very 
patient listener, was content to take the second part 
when Johnson was present; and the club itself, con- 
sisting of so many eminent men, is to this day popu- 
larly designated as Johnson's Club. ^v - -> 

Among the members of this celebrated body was 
one to whom it has owed the greater part of its celeb- 
rity, yet who was regarded with little respect by his 
brethren, and had not without difficulty obtained a 
seat among them. This was James Boswell,^ a young 
Scotch lawyer, heir to an honorable name and a fair 
estate. That he was a coxcomb and a bore, weak, 
vain, pushing, curious, garrulous, was obvious to all 
who were acquainted with him. That he could not 
reason, that he had no wit, no humor, no eloquence, 
is aj^parent from his writings. And yet his writings 
are read beyond the Mississippi and under the South- 
ern Cross, and are likely to be read as long as the 
English exists, either as a living or as a dead lan- 
guage. Nature had made him a slave and an idolater. 
His mind resembled those creepers which the bot- 
anists call parasites, and which can subsist only by 
clinging round the stems, and imbibing the juices, 
of stronger plants. He must have fastened himself 
on somebody. He might have fastened himself on 
Wilkes, 2 and have become the fiercest patriot in the 

1 1740-1795. 

2 John Wilkes (1727-1797), the notorious demagogue, editor 
of The North Briton. The society mentioned by Maeaulay was 
founded to help Wilkes in his struggle with Parliament. See 
the essay on Chatham. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 47 

Bill of Rights Society. He might have fastened 
himseK on Whitefield,^ and have become the loudest 
field-preacher among the Calvinistic Methodists. In 
a happy hour he fastened himself on Johnson. The 
pair might seem ill-matched. For Johnson had early 
been prejudiced against Boswell's country. ^ To a 
man of Johnson's strong understanding and irritable 
temper, the silly egotism and adulation of Boswell 
must have been as teasing as the constant buzz of a 
fly. Johnson hated to be questioned; and Boswell 
was eternally catechising him on all kinds of subjects, 
and sometimes propounded such questions as, "What 
would you do, sir, if you were locked up in a tower 
with a baby?" Johnson was a water-drinker and 
Boswell w^as a wiiie-bibber, and, indeed, little better 
than an habitual sot. It was impossible that there 
should be perfect harmony betw^een two such compan- 
ions. Indeed, the great man was sometimes provoked 
into fits of passion, in which he said things which the 
small man, during a few hours, seriously resented. 
Every quarrel, however, was soon made up. During 
twenty years, the disciple continued to worship the 
master ; ^ the master continued to scold the disciple, 
to sneer at him, and to love him. The two friends 
ordinarily resided at a great distance from each other. 
Boswell practised in the Parliament House of Edin- 
burgh, and could pay only occasional visits to Lon- 
don. During those visits, his chief business was to 
watch Johnson, to discover all Johnson's habits, to 
turn the conversation to subjects about which John- 

1 George Whitefiekl (1714-1770), the famous revivalist. 

2 Scotland. Cf. his well-known definition of oats as a grain 
used as food for horses in England but for people in Scotland. 

8 Boswell first met Johnson in 1763. 



48 MAC A UL AY. 

son was likely to say something remarkable, and to 
fill quarto note-books with minutes of what Johnson 
had said. In this way were gathered the materials 
out of which was afterwards constructed the most 
interesting biographical work in the world. 

Soon after the club began to exist, Johnson formed 
a connection less important, indeed, to his fame, but 
much more imjDortant to his happiness, than his con- 
nection with Boswell. Henry Thrale — one of the 
most 02:>ulent brewers in the kingdom, a man of sound 
and cultivated understanding, rigid principles, and 
liberal spirit — was married to one of those clever, 
kind-hearted, engaging, vain, pert young women who 
are perpetually doing or saying what is not exactly 
right, but who, do or say what they may, are always 
agreeable. 1 In 1765 the Thrales became acquainted 
with Johnson, and the acquaintance ripened fast into 
friendship. They were astonished and delighted by 
the brilliancy of his conversation. They were flat- 
tered by finding that a man so widely celebrated pre- 
ferred their house to any other in London. Even the 
peculiarities which seemed to unfit him for civilized 
society — his gesticulations, his rollings, his puffings, 
his mutter ings, the strange way in which he put on 
his clothes, the ravenous eagerness with which he de- 
voured his dinner, his fits of melancholy, his fits of 
anger, his frequent rudeness, his occasional ferocity 
— increased the interest which his new associates 

I Mrs. Thrale was Hester Lynch Salisbury (1741-1821). She 
married Thrale in 1763, and after his death, in 1781, was fasci- 
nated by Gabriel Piozzi, an Italian music-teacher, and married 
him (1784). In 1786 she issued her valuable Anecdots<^ of Dr. 
Johnson. She was a voluminous writer besides and a small 
poetess. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 49 

took in him. For these things were the cruel marks 
left behind by a life which had been one long conflict 
with disease and with adversity. In a vulgar hack 
writer, such oddities would have excited only disgust; 
but in a man of genius, learning, and virtue, their 
effect was to add pity to admiration and esteem. 
Johnson soon had an apartment at the brewery in 
Southwark,^ and a still more pleasant apartment at 
the villa of his friends on Streatham Common. ^ A 
large part of every year he passed in those abodes, — 
abodes which must have seemed magnificent and luxu- 
rious indeed, when compared with the dens in which 
he had generally been lodged. But his chief pleasures 
were derived from what the astronomer of his Abys- 
sinian tale called "the endearing elegance of female 
friendship." Mrs. Thrale rallied him, soothed him, 
coaxed him, and, if she sometimes provoked him by 
her flippancy, made ample amends by listening to his 
reproofs with angelic sweetness of temper. When he 
was diseased in body and in mind, she was the most 
tender of nurses. No comfort that wealth could ^^ur- 
chase, no contrivance that womanly ingenuity, set to 
work by womanly compassion, could devise, was 
wanting to his sick-room. He requited her kind- 
ness by an affection pure as the affection of a father, 
yet delicately tinged with a gallantry which, though 
awkward, must have been more flattering than the 
attentions of a crowd of the fools who gloried in 
the names, now obsolete, of buck and maccaroni.^ It 

^ A district on the south side of the Thames, 
^ About six miles out from what was then the town. 
^ Dandy or fop. Cf. " Yankee Doodle." Mac(c)aroni was 
the name given to a club of fast young men who had been abroad 
and had brought back a taste for foreign dress and manners. 



50 MACAULAY. 

should seem that a full half of Johnson's life, during 
about sixteen years, was passed under the roof of the 
Thrales. He accompanied the family sometimes to 
Bath,^ and sometimes to Brighton, ^ once to Wales, 
and once to Paris. ^ But he had at the same time a 
house in one of the narrow and gloomy courts on the 
north of Fleet Street. In the garrets was his library, 
a large and miscellaneous collection of books, falling 
to pieces, and begrimed with dust. On a lower floor 
he sometimes, but very rarely, regaled a friend with 
a plain dinner, — a veal pie, or a leg of lamb and 
spinach, and a rice pudding. Nor was the dwelling 
uninhabited during his long absences. It was the 
home of the most extraordinary assemblage of inmates 
that ever was brought together. At the head of the 
establishment Johnson had placed an old lady named 
Williams, whose chief recommendations were her 
blindness and her poverty. But, in spite of her mur- 
murs and reproaches, he gave an asylum to another 
lady who was as poor as herself, Mrs. Desmoulins, 
whose family he had known many years before in 
Staffordshire. Room was found for the daughter of 
Mrs. Desmoulins, and for another destitute damsel, 
who was generally addressed as Miss Carmichael, but 
whom her generous host called Polly. An old quack 
doctor named Levett,* who bled and dosed coal-heav- 

^ The leading watering-place of the eighteenth century. 

2 A famous seaside resort. 

3 In 1775. 

4 For this old quack, who died Jan. 17, 1782, Johnson wrote 
an elegy entitled On the Death of Mr. Robert Levet, a Practiser 
in Physic, that for genuine sentiment and admirable style de- 
serves a high place in its class of compositions, and suggests a 
regret that its aiithor did not oftener try his hand on similar 
subjects. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 51 

ers and hackney - coachmen, and received for fees 
crusts of bread, bits of bacon, glasses of gin, and 
sometimes a little copper, completed this strange 
menagerie. All these poor creatures were at constant 
war with each other and with Johnson's negro servant 
Frank. Sometimes, indeed, they transferred their 
hostilities from the servant to the master, complained 
that a better table was not kept for them, and railed 
or maundered till their benefactor was glad to make 
his escape to Streatham, or to the Mitre Tavern.^ 
And yet he who was generally the haughtiest and 
most irritable of mankind, who was but too prompt 
to resent anything wdiich looked like a slight on the 
part of a purse-proud bookseller, or of a noble and 
powerful patron, bore patiently from mendicants, 
who but for his bounty must have gone to the work- 
house, insults more provoking than those for which 
he had knocked down Osborne and bidden defiance 
to Chesterfield. Year after year Mrs. Williams and 
Mrs. Desmoulins, Polly and Levctt, continued to tor- 
ment him and to live upon liim. 

The course of life ^'vhich has been described was 
interrupted in Johnson's sixty -fourth year by an im- 
portant event. He had early read an account of the 
Hebrides, and had been much interested by learning 
that there was so near him a land peopled by a race 
which was still as rude and simple as in the Middle 
Ages. A wish to become intimately acquainted with 
a state of society so utterly unlike all that he had 
ever seen, frequently crossed his mind. But it is not 
probable that his curiosity would have overcome hi- 
habitual sluggishness, and his love of the smoke, the. 
mud, and the cries of London, had not Boswell im- 
1 In Fleet Street. 



52 MAC AULA Y. 

portuned liim to attempt the adventure, and offered 
to be liis squire. At length, m August, 1773, John- 
son crossed the Highland line, and plunged coura- 
geously into what was then considered, by most Eng- 
lishmen, as a dreary and perilous wilderness. After 
wandering about two months through the Celtic re- 
gion, sometimes in rude boats which did not protect 
him from the rain, and sometimes on small shaggy 
ponies which could hardly bear his weight, he re- 
turned to his old haunts with a mind full of new 
images and new theories. During the following year 
he employed himself in recording his adventures. 
About the beginning of 1775, his "Journey to the 
Hebrides " was published, and was, during some 
weeks, the chief subject of conversation in all circles 
in which any attention v/as paid to literature. The 
• -^ok is still read with pleasure. The narrative is 
entertaining ; the speculations, whether sound or un- 
ooantl, are alw^y.-, mo^enious; iand the style, though 
i%o stiff and pompous,, is somewhat easier and more 
r^raceful than that of his ?arly writings. His preju- 
dice against the Scotch had a"t length become little 
more than matter of jest; and whatever remained of 
the old feeling had been effectuaily removed by the 
kind and respectful hospitality v/ith which he had 
been received in every part of Scotland. It was, of 
course, not to be expected that an Oxonian Tory 
should praise the Presbyterian polity and ritual, or 
that an eye accustomed to the hedgerows and parks 
of England should not be struck by the bareness of 
Berwickshire and East Lothian. But even in cen- 
sure Johnson's tone is not unfriendly. The most 
enlightened Scotchmen, with Lord Mansfield ^ at their 
1 William Murray, Earl of Mansfield (1705-1793), one of the 
OTeatest of British jurists. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 53 

head, were well pleased. But some foolish and igno- 
rant Scotchmen were moved to anger by a little un- 
palatable truth which was mingled with much eulogy, 
and assailed him, whom they chose to consider as the 
enemy of their country, with libels mu«:^h more dis- 
honorable to their country than anything that he had 
ever said or written. They published paragraphs in 
the newspapers, articles in the magazines, sixpenny 
pamphlets, five-shilling books. One scribbler abused 
Johnson for being blear-eyed; another, for being a 
pensioner ; a third informed the world that one of the 
doctor's uncles had been convicted of felony in Scot- 
land, and had found that there was in that country 
one tree capable of supporting the weiglit of an Eng- 
lishman. Macpherson,^ whose "Fingal" had been 
proved in the " Journey " ^ to be an impudent for- 
gery, threatened to take vengeance with a cane. The 
only effect of this threat was, that Johnson reiterated 
t^e charge of forgery in the most contemptuous terms, 
and walked about, during some time, with a cudgel, 
which, if the impostor had not been too wise to en- 
counter it, would assuredly have descended upon him, 
to borrow the sublime language of his own epic poem, 
"like a hammer on the red son of the furnace." 

^ The details of the Ossian controversy started by James 
Macpherson's (1738-1796) epic Fingal (1762), which purported 
to he a translation from the Gaelic bard of the third century, 
A. D., cannot he given here. It is generally held that Macpherson 
drew mainly upon his own imagination, for he never produced 
documentary evidence for his claims. His poems were, however, 
immensely popular for a while both in England and on the Con- 
tinent. Thomas Jefferson admired him greatly. 

^ In the division entitled " Ostig in Sky." All mention of 
Macpherson by name is carefully avoided, which doubtless 
made him more angry. 



54 MACAULAY. 

Of other assailants Johnson took no notice what- 
ever. He had early resolved never to be drawn into 
controversy; and he adhered to his resolution with a 
steadfastness which is the more extraordinary because 
he was, both intellectually and morally, of the stuff 
of which controversialists are made. In conversa- 
tion he was a singularly eager, acute, and pertina- 
cious disputant. When at a loss for good reasons, 
he had recourse to sophistry; and when heated by 
altercation, he made unsparing use of sarcasm and 
invective. But when he took his pen in his hand, 
his whole character seemed to be changed. A hun- 
dred bad writers misrepresented him and reviled him ; 
but not one of the hundred could boast of having 
been thought by him worthy of a refutation, or even 
of a retort. The Kenricks, Campbells, MacNicols, 
and Hendersons ^ did their best to annoy him, in the 
hope that he would give them importance by answer- 
ing them. But the reader will in vain search his 
works for any allusion to Kenrick or Campbell, to 
MacNicol or Henderson. One Scotchman, bent on 
vindicating the fame of Scotch learning, defied him 
to the combat in a detestable Latin hexameter : — 

"Maxime, si tu vis, cupio contendere tecum."- 
But Johnson took no notice of the challenge. He 
had learned, both from his own observation and from 
literary history, in which he was deeply read, that 
the place of books in the public estimation is fixed, 
not by what is written about them, but by what is 
written in them ; and that an author whose works are 
likely to live is very unwise if he stoops to wrangle 

1 See Hill's or Napier's edition of Boswell for these obscure 
men. 

2 " I desire very much to contend with you if you are willing." 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 55 

with detractors whose works are certain to die. He 
always maintained that fame was a shnttlecock, which 
coukl be kept up only by being beaten back as well 
as beaten forward, and which would soon fall if there 
were only one battledore. No saying was oftener in 
his mouth than that fine apothegm of Bentley,i that 
no man was ever written down but by himself. 

Unhappily, a few months after the appearance of 
the "Journey to the Hebrides," Johnson did what 
none of his envious assailants could have done, and 
to a certain extent succeeded in writing himself 
down. The disputes between England and her Amer- 
ican colonies had reached a point at which no ami- 
cable adjustment was possible. Civil war was evi- 
dently impending; and the ministers seem to have 
thought that the eloquence of Johnson might with 
advantage be employed to inflame the nation against 
the opposition here, and against the rebels beyond 
the Atlantic. He had already written two or three 
tracts in defence of the foreign and domestic policy 
of the government; and those tracts, though hardly 
worthy of him, w^ere much superior to the crowd of 
pamphlets which lay on the counters of Almon and 
Stockdale.2 But his "Taxation no Tyranny " ^ was 
a pitiable failure. The very title was a silly phrase, 

1 Richard Bentley (1662-1742), in some respects the greatest 
classical scholar Englancl has produced. He has gained a place 
in English literature by his masterly Dissertation^ in which he 
showed that the so-called Epistles of Phalaris were spurious, 
and won a complete victory over sucli men as Atterbury, Swift, 
and Temple. See Swift's Battle of the Books, Macaulay's essay 
on Atterbury, and the Dissertation itself. 

- Well-known booksellers of the period. 

3 Appeared in 1775, and was a defense of the government 
policy toward the American colonies. 



56 MACAULAY. 

whicli can have been recommended to his choice by 
nothing but a jingling alliteration which he ought to 
have despised. The arguments were such as boys 
use in debating societies. The pleasantry was as 
awkward as the gambols of a hippopotamus. Even 
Boswell was forced to own that in this ^unfortunate 
piece he could detect no trace of his master's powers. 
The general opinion was, that the strong faculties 
which had produced the Dictionary and "The Ram- 
bler" were beginning to feel the effect of time and of 
disease, and that the old man would best consult his 
credit by writing no more. 

But this was a great mistake. Johnson had failed, 
not because his mind was less vigorous than when he 
wrote "Rasselas" in the evenings of a week, but be- 
cause he had foolishly chosen, or suffered others to 
choose for him, a subject such as he would at no time 
have been competent to treat. He was in no sense 
a statesman. He never willingly read, or thought, 
or talked about, affairs of state. He loved biogra- 
phy, literary history, the history of manners ; but 
political history was positively distasteful to him. 
The question at issue between the colonies and the 
mother country was a question about which he had 
really nothing to say. He failed, therefore, as the 
greatest men must fail when they attempt to do that 
for which they are unfit; as Burke would have failed 
if Burke had tried to write comedies like those of 
Sheridan;^ as Reynolds would have failed if Rey- 
nolds had tried to paint landscapes like those of 

1 Richard Briiisley (Butler) Sheridan (1751-1816) in his 
Rivals ?a\^ School for Scandal was, with the possible exception of 
Goldsmith, the best writer of comedies since Congreve's time. 
He was also a noted orator. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 57 

Wilson.^ Happily, Johnson soon had an opportu- 
nity of proving most signally that his failure was not 
to be ascribed to intellectual decay. 

On Easter Eve, 1777, some persons, deputed by a 
meeting which consisted of forty of the first book- 
sellers in London, called upon him. Though he had 
some scruples about doing business at that season, he 
received his visitors with much civility. They came 
to inform him that a new edition of the English poets, 
from Cowley downwards, was in contemplation, and 
to ask him to furnish short biographical prefaces. 
He readily undertook the task, a task for which he 
was preeminently qualified. His knowledge of the 
literary history of England since the Restoration was 
unrivalled. That knowledge he had derived partly 
from books, and partly from sources which had long 
been closed, — from old Grub Street traditions ; from 
the talk of forgotten poetasters and pamphleteers 
who had long been lying in parish vaults; from the 
recollections of such men as Gilbert Walmesley, who 
had conversed with the wits of Button;^ Gibber,^ who 
had mutilated the pla3^s of two generations of drama- 
tists; Orrery,^ who had been admitted to the society 

1 Richard Wilson (1714-1782). 

2 Button's coffee-house, near Covent Garden, was frequented 
by Addison and his friends. Its proprietor had been butler to 
Lady Warwick. 

8 CoUey Gibber (1671-1757) was an actor and a dramatist of 
versatility who, absurdly enough, was made poet laureate. He 
was satirized in the Dunciad and felt Dr. Johnson's wrath. He 
is now remembered chiefly for his Autobiography and for the 
hne, " Richard is himself again," which he introduced into his 
version of Richard III. 

4 John Boyle (1707-1662), fifth earl of Orrery, who wrote a 
biography of Swift. 



58 MA CAUL AY. 

of Swift ; and Savage, who had rendered services of 
no very honorable kind to Pope.^ The biographer, 
therefore, sat down to his task with a mind fnll of 
matter. He had at first intended to give only a 
paragraph to every minor poet, and only four or five 
pages to the greatest name. But the flood of anec- 
dote and criticism overflowed the narrow channel. 
The work, which was originally meant to consist only 
of a few sheets, swelled into ten volumes, — small 
volumes, it is true, and not closely printed. The 
first four appeared in 1779, the remaining six in 
1781.2 

The "Lives of the Poets" are, on the whole, the 
best of Johnson's works. The narratives are as en- 
tertaining as any novel. The remarks on life and on 
human nature are eminently shrewd and profound. 
The criticisms are often excellent, and, even when 
grossly and provokingly unjust, well deserve to be 
studied; for, however erroneous they may be, they are 
never silly. They are the judgments of a mind tram- 
meled by prejudice and deficient in sensibility, but 
vigorous and acute. They therefore generally con- 
tain a portion of valuable truth which deserves to be 
separated from the alloy, and at the very worst they 
mean something, — a praise to which much of what 
is called criticism in our time has no pretensions. 

Savage's "Life" Johnson reprinted nearly as it 
had appeared in 1744. Whoever, after reading that 
life, will turn to the other lives, will be struck by the 
difference of style. Since Johnson had been at ease 
in his circumstances, he had written little and had 

^ Helped him on the Dunciad. See Johnson's Life of Savage. 
2 Matthew Arnold edited the more important Lives, and Mr. 
Arthur Waugh has since edited the complete work. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 59 

talked mucli. ^^Hiien, therefore, he, after the lapse 
of years, resumed his pen, the mannerism which he 
had contracted while he was in the constant habit of 
elaborate composition was less perceptible than for- 
merly; and his diction frequently had a colloquial 
ease which it had formerly wanted. The improve- 
ment may be discerned by a skilful critic in the 
"Journey to the Hebrides," and in the "Lives of the 
Poets " is so obvious that it cannot escape the notice 
of the most careless reader. 

Among the lives the best are, perhaps, those of 
Cowley, Dryden, and Pope. The very worst is, be- 
yond all doubt, that of Gray.^ ♦ .,*- 

This great work at once became popular. There 
was, indeed, much just and much unjust censure; 
but even those who were loudest in blame were at- 
tracted by the book in spite of themselves. Malone ^ 
computed the gains of the publishers at five or six 
thousand pounds. But the writer was very poorly 
remunerated. Intending at first to write very short 
prefaces, he had stipulated for only two hundred 
guineas. The booksellers, when they saw how far 
his performance had surpassed his promise, added 
only another hundred. Indeed, Johnson, though he 
did not despise, or affect to despise, money, and 
though his strong sense and long experience ought to 
have qualified him to protect his own interests, seems 

1 Arnold selected the Lives of Milton, Addison, Swift, Dry- 
den, Pope and Gray, but he was influenced by the place they 
occupy in literature. Jolmson was not well fitted to appreciate 
Thomas Gray (1716-1771), but this fact hardly accounts for the 
deficiencies of his account of that great scholar and poet. 

2 Edmund Malone (1741-1812), chiefly noted for his labors 
as an editor of Shakespeare. He also edited Bos well. 



60 MAC A UL AY, 

to have been singularly unskillful and unlucky in his 
literary barg ins. He was generally reputed the first 
English writer of his time, yet several writers of his 
time sold their copyrights for sums such as he never 
ventured to ask. To give a single instance, Kobert- 
son 1 received four thousand five hundred pounds for 
the "History of Charles V. ; " and it is no disrespect 
to the memory of Robertson to say that the "History 
of Charles V." is both a less valuable and a less 
amusing book than the "Lives of the Poets." 

Johnson was now in his seventy-second year. The 
infirmities of age were coming fast uj^on him. That 
inevitable event of which he never thought without 
horror was brought near to him, and his whole life 
was darkened by the shadow of death. He had often 
to pay the cruel price of longevity. Every year he 
lost what could never be replaced. The strange de- 
pendents to whom he had given shelter, and to whom, 
in spite of their faults, he was strongly attached by 
habit, dropped off one by one; and in the silence of 
his home he regretted even the noise of their scolding- 
matches. The kind and generous Thrale was no 
more, and it would have been well if his wife had 
been laid beside him. But she survived to be the 
laughing-stock of those who had envied her, and to 
draw, from the eyes of the old man who had loved 
her beyond anything in the world, tears far more 
bitter than he would have shed over her grave. 
With some estimable and many agreeable qualities, 
she was not made to be independent. The conti-ol of 

1 Dr. William Robertson (1721-1793), one of Johnson's few 
Scotch friends. The history of the great Emperor and that 
relating to America are still standard books, but are probably 
little read. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 61 

a mind more steadfast than her own was necessary to 
her respectability. While she was rest: ained by her 
husband, — a man of sense and firmness, indulgent 
to her taste in trifles, but always the undisputed 
master of his house, — her worst offences had been 
impertinent jokes, white lies, and short fits of pettish- 
ness ending in sunny good -humor. But he was gone ; 
and she was left an opulent widow of forty, with 
strong sensibilitj, volatile fancy, and slender judg- 
ment. She ^00^ fell in love with a music-master 
from Brescia, in whom nobody but herself could dis- 
cover anything to admire. Her pride, and perhaps 
some better feelings, struggled hard against this 
degrading passion; but. the struggle irritated her 
nerves, soured her temper, and at length endangered 
her health. Conscious that her choice was one which 
Johnson could not approve, she became desirous to 
escape from his inspection. Her manner towards 
him changed. She was sometimes cold and some- 
times petulant. She did not conceal her joy when he 
left Streatham ; she never pressed him to return ; and 
if he came unbidden, she received him in a manner 
which convinced him that he was no longer a welcome 
guest. He took the very intelligible hints which she 
gave. He read, for the last time, a chapter of the 
Greek Testament in tlie library which had been 
formed by himself. In a solemn and tender prayer, 
he commended the house and its inmates to the Di- 
vine protection, and, with emotions which choked his 
voice and convulsed his powerful frame, left forever 
that beloved home for the gloomy and desolate house 
behind Fleet Street, where the few and evil days 
which still remained to him were to run out. Here, 
in June, 1783, he had a paralytic stroke, from which, 



62 MACAULAY. 

however, he recovered, and which does not appear to 
have at all impaired his intellectual faculties. But 
other maladies came thick upon him. His asthma 
tormented him day and night. Dropsical symptoms 
made their appearance. While sinking under a com- 
plication of diseases, he heard that the woman whose 
friendship) had been the chief happiness of sixteen 
years of his life had married an Italian fiddler, that 
all London was crying shame upon her, and that the 
newspapers and magazines were filled with allusions 
to the Ephesian matron ^ and the two pictures in 
"Hamlet. "2 He vehemently said that he would try 
to forofet her existence. He never uttered her name. 
Every memorial of her which met his eye he flung 
into the fire. She, meanwhile, fled from the laughter 
and hisses of her countrymen and countrywomen to a 
land where she was unknown, hastened across Mont 
Cenis, and learned, while passing a merry Christmas 
of concerts and lemonade parties at Milan, that the 
great man with whose name hers is inseparably asso- 
ciated had ceased to exist. ^ 

He had, in spite of much mental and much bodily 
aflliction, clung vehemently to life. The feeling de- 
scribed in that fine but gloomy paper ^ which closes 
the series of his "Idlers" seemed to grow stronger in 

1 See Petronius Arbiter, chap. xiii. (Bolm). The matron went 
down to die in the tomb where her husband was lying dead, and 
fell in love with the soldier set to guard him. The story is found 
in various forms. 

2 Act III. scene iv. 

^ Macaulay seems to have done injustice to Mrs. Piozzi and 
her husband. Johnson's letter, to the widow, of July 8, 1784, 
should be read in connection with this passage. It is one of the 
most pathetic in literature. 

^ The paper mentioned is an admirable specimen of Johnson's 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 63 

liim as his last hour drew near. He fancied that he 
shoukl be able to draw his breath more easily in a 
southern climate, and would probably have set out 
for Rome and Naples, but for his fear of the expense 
of the journey. That expense, indeed, he had the 
means of defraying; for he had laid up about two 
thousand pounds, the fruit of labors which had made 
the fortune of several publishers. But he was un- 
willing to break in uj^on this hoard, and he seems 
to have wished even to keep its existence a secret. 
Some of his friends hoped that the government might 
be induced to increase his pension to six hundred 
pounds a year; but this hope was disappointed, and 
he resolved to stand one English winter more. That 
winter was his last. His legs grew weaker; his 
breath grew shorter; the fatal water gathered fast, 
in spite of incisions which he — courageous against 
pain, but timid against death — urged his surgeons to 
make deeper and deeper. Though the tender care 
which had mitigated his sufferings during months 
of sickness at Streatham was withdrawn, he was not 
left desolate. The ablest physicians and surgeons 
attended him, and refused to accej^t fees from him. 
Burke parted from him with deep emotion. Wind- 
ham^ sat much in the sick-room, arranged the pil- 
lows, and sent his own servant to watch at night by 
the bed. Frances Burney,^ whom the old man had 

power of moralizing in a sincere and moving way. It should 
be read by all who are interested in the Doctor, whether as a 
writer or as a man. 

^ William Windham (1750-1810), a noted parliamentary 
orator. 

2 1752-1840, afterwards Madame d'Arblay. (See Macaulay's 
essay on her.) Her novel Evelina is a classic worthy of Macau- 
lay's well-known praise. 



64 MACAULAY. 

cherished with fatherly kindness, stood weeping at 
the door ; while Langton, whose piety eminently qual- 
ified him to be an adviser and comforter at such a 
time, received the last pressure of his friend's hand 
within. When at length the moment, dreaded 
through so many years, came close, the dark cloud 
passed away from Johnson's mind. His temper be- 
came unusually patient and gentle; he ceased to 
think with terror of death and of that which lies be- 
yond death; and he spoke much of the mercy of God 
and of the propitiation of Christ. In this serene 
frame of mind he died, on the 13th of December, 
1784. He was laid a week later in Westminster 
Abbey, among the eminent men of whom he had 
been the historian, — Cowley and Denham, Dryden 
and Congreve, Gay, Prior, and Addison. ^ 

Since his death, the popularity of his works — 
the "Lives of the Poets" and perhaps "The Vanity 
of Human Wishes" excepted — has greatly dimin- 
ished. His Dictionary has been altered by editors 
till it can scarcely be called his. An allusion to 
his "Rambler" or his "Idler" is not readily appre- 
hended in literary circles. The fame even of "Ras- 
selas " has grown somewhat dim. But, though the 
celebrity of the writings may have declined, the celeb- 
rity of the writer, strange to say, is as great as ever. 
Boswell's book has done for him more than the best 

1 For these great inhabitants of " Poets' Corner " the text and 
notes have already given sufficient explanation, save, perhaps, in 
the case of William Congreve (1670-1729), the brilliant drama- 
tist, whose comedies are in some respects unrivaled, and of 
Matthew Prior (1664-1721), who as a writer of society verse is 
still uneclipsed, though Praed and Austin Dobson have followed 
him. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 65 

of his own books could do. The memory of other 
authors is kept alive by their works, but the memory 
of Johnson keeps many of his works alive. The old 
philosopher is still among us in the brown coat with 
the metal buttons, and the shirt which ought to be at 
wash, blinking, puffing, rolling his head, drumming 
with his fingers, tearing his meat like a tiger, and 
swallowing his tea in oceans. No human being who 
has been more than seventy years in the grave is so 
well known to us. And it is but just to say that our 
intimate acquaintance with what he would himself 
have called the anfractuosities ^ of his intellect and of 
his temper serves only to strengthen our conviction 
that he was both a great and a good man.^ 

^ That is, the windings and turnings. 

2 The style of this concluding paragraph may well be com- 
pared with that of the conclusion of the essay on Milton. It is 
m.uch quieter and is free from many of the defects of the more 
youthful work, yet somewhat lacks the ela7i of the latter. Indeed, 
the whole essay shows a chastened Macaulay and so has won 
high praise from the fastidious critic, whom the panegyric on 
Milton sometimes displeased, Mr. Matthew Arnold. In its 
evolution, too, the essay is perfectly simple and straightforward, 
so that an analysis by paragraphs would be an easy task for the 
youngest student. This very freedom from complexity accounts 
in part for the popularity of the composition. 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 



PREFATORY NOTE. 



The short sketch of Goldsmith was contributed to the Ency- 
clopcedia Britannica in 1856, and is still included in the latest 
edition. Like the essay on Johnson it represents Macaulay at his 
best. There is little of the partisanship, the exaggeration, the 
misleading but fascinating rhetoric to be found in many of the 
earlier essays ; but there is the same fullness of knowledge, 
the same facility of allusion and reference, the same clarity 
and straightforwardness of style. As in the Johnson there is 
a sympathy with the subject of his sketch (who could fail to 
sympathize with Goldsmith !) which Macaulay did not always 
have, hence the reader puts the essay down with a feeling of 
attraction toward both the wayward genius and his exemplary 
critic. There can be no better test of good criticism than this. 

As for Goldsmith, it is too late in the day to undertake his 
praise. He shares with Charles Lamb the distinction of deserv- 
ing an epithet which the French threw away upon one of their 
most worthless kings, — the Well Beloved. Everybody reads 
The Vicar of Wakefield and The Deserted Village^ and every- 
body loves their author. A distinguished American economist 
once told the present writer that he never began to compose a 
new book without first reading here and there in Goldsmith, in 
order that he might, if possible, catch something of the. secret 
of that artless style which has captivated generations of readers. 
The student can do no better than to follow this excellent exam- 
ple; at any rate he should not fail to make himself experience 
the charm of Goldsmith's style, whether he imitate it or not. 
This he can easily do, for the complete works — that is, the 
miscellaneous works, which are all one needs — are accessible 
in the Globe edition, to which Professor Masson has prefixed 



68 MACAULAY. 

an excellent introduction. The standard biographies are men- 
tioned by Macaulay, and to these may be added those by the 
novelist William Black (in the English Men of Letters) and by 
the poet Austin Dobsou (in the Great Writers, with a biblio- 
graphy). 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 



Oliver Goldsmith was one of the most pleasing 
English writers of the eighteenth century. He was 
of a Protestant and Saxon family which had been 
long settled in Ireland, and which had, like most 
other Protestant and Saxon families, been in troubled 
times harassed and put in fear by the native popu- 
lation. His father, Charles Goldsmith, studied, in 
the reign of Queen Anne, at the diocesan school of 
Elphin,^ became attached to the daughter of the 
schoolmaster, married her, took orders, and settled 
at a place called Pallas, in the county of Longford. 
There he with difficulty supported his wife and chil- 
dren on what he could earn, partly as a curate and 
partly as a farmer. 

At Pallas Oliver Goldsmith was born in Novem- 
ber, 1728.^ That spot was then, for all practical pur- 
poses, almost as remote from the busy and splendid 
capital in which his later years were passed, as any 
clearing in Upper Canada or any sheep-walk in Aus- 
tralasia now is. Even at this day, those enthusiasts 
who venture to make a pilgrimage to the birthplace 
of the poet are forced to perform the latter part of 
their journey on foot. The hamlet lies far from any 

1 In Roscommon Coir'/. For the history of Ireland at this 
juncture, consult Lecky and Froude. 

2 November 10th. "" 



70 MAC A [/LAY. 

high-road, on a dreary plain, which in wet weather 
is often a lake. The lanes would break any jaunt- 
ing car^ to pieces; and there are ruts and sloughs 
through which the most strongly built wheels cannot 
be dragged. 

When Oliver was still a child, his father was pre- 
sented to a living, worth about two hundred pounds 
a year, in the county of Westmeath. The family 
accordingly quitted their cottage in the wilderness 
for a spacious house on a frequented road, near the 
village of Lissoy. Here the boy was taught his let- 
ters by a maid-servant, and was sent in his seventh 
year to a village school kept by an old quartermas- 
ter^ on half -pay, who professed to teach nothing but 
reading, writing, and arithmetic, but who had an in- 
exhaustible fund of stories about ghosts, banshees,^ 
and fairies, — about the great Rapparee ^ chiefs, Bal- 
dearg O'Donnell and galloping Hogan, and about the 
exploits of Peterborough and Stanhope,^ the surprise 
of Monjuich, and the glorious disaster of Brihuega. 
This man must have been of the Protestant religion; 

^ A typically Irish vehicle. 

2 " Paddy " Byrne. 

^ A female fairy, believed to be attacRed to a particular 
house, and to foretell at each appearance the death of an in- 
mate. 

^ The word means a noisy fellow, — then a vagrant or robber. 
It refers specifically to wild native Irishmen, who for many 
years committed agrarian outrages. Hugh Baldearg O'Don- 
nell, one of the most noted of these freebooters, died in 1704. 

8 Charles Mordaunt, Earl of Peterborough (1658?-1735), and 
James, Lord Stanhope (1673-1721), were both generals who 
won great reputation in Spain during the War of the Spanish 
Succession, especially in the battles mentioned. Peterborough 
had a very romantic career, and Stanhope was afterwards aa 
important statesman. 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 71 

but he was of the aboriginal race, and not only spoke 
the Irish language, but could pour forth unpremedi- 
tated Irish verses. Oliver early became, and through 
life continued to be, a passionate admirer of the Irish 
music, and especially of the compositions of Carolan,i 
some of the last notes of whose harp he heard. It 
ought to be added that Oliver, though by birth one 
of the Englishry, and though connected by numerous 
ties with the Established Church, never showed the 
least sign of that contemptuous antipathy with which, 
in his days, the ruling minority in Ireland too gener- 
ally regarded the subject majority. So far, indeed, 
was he from sharing in the opinions and feelings of 
the caste to which he belonged, that he conceived an 
aversion to the Glorious and Immortal Memory,^ and, 
even when George the Third was on the throne, main- 
tained that nothing but the restoration of the banished 
dynasty could save the country. 

From the humble academy kept by the old sol- 
dier Goldsmith was removed in his ninth year. He 
went to several grammar schools, and acquired some 
knowledge of the ancient languages. His life at this 
time seems to have been far from happy. He had, 
as appears from the admirable portrait of him at 
Knowle,^ features harsh even to ugliness. The 
small -pox ^ had set its mark on him with more than 
usual severity. His stature was small, and his limbs 
ill put together. Among boys, little tenderness is 

1 Turlogh Carolan (1670-1738), the most famous of tlie mod- 
ern Irish bards. 

2 The formula used in the Whig toast to William III. 

3 Better spelt Knole, the seat of Lord Sackville in Kent, one 
of the finest baronial halls in England. The portrait mentioned 
is by Sir Joshua Reynolds. 

^ This disease was very common at the time. 



72 MACAULAY. 

shown to i3ersonal defects; and the ridicule excited 
by poor Oliver's aj^pearance was heightened by a 
peculiar simplicity and a disposition to blunder which 
he retained to the last. He became the common butt 
of boys and masters, was pointed at as a fright in the 
playground, and flogged as a dunce in the school- 
room. When he had risen to eminence, those who 
once derided him ransacked their memory for the 
events of his early years, and recited repartees and 
couplets which had dropped from him, and which, 
though little noticed at the time, were supposed, a 
quarter of a century later, to indicate the powers 
which produced "The Vicar of Wakefield " and "The 
Deserted Village." 

In his seventeenth year Oliver went up to Trinity 
College, Dublin, as a sizar. ^ The sizars paid nothing 
for food and tuition, and very little for lodging; but 
they had to perform some menial services from which 
they have long been relieved. They swept the court; 
they carried up the dinner to the fellows' table, and 
changed the plates and poured out the ale of the 
rulers of the society. Goldsmith was quartered, not 
alone, in a garret, on the window of which his name, 
scrawled by himself, is still read with interest. From 
such garrets many men of less parts than his have 
made their way to the wool-sack or to the episcopal 
bench. ^ But Goldsmith, while he suffered all the 
humiliations, threw away all the advantages of his 
situation. He neglected the studies of the place, 
stood low at the examinations, was turned down to 

1 A term applied to certain undergraduates at Cambridge and 
Trinity College, Dublin, sufficiently described in the text. 

2 That is, have become Lord Chancellors or Bishops sitting 
in the House of Peers. 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 73 

the bottom of liis class for playing the buffoon in the 
lecture-room, was severely reprimanded for pumping 
on a constable, and was caned by a brutal tutor ^ for 
giving a ball in the attic story of the college to some 
gay youths and damsels from the city. 

While Oliver was leading at Dublin a life divided 
between squalid distress and squalid dissipation, his 
father died,^ leaving a mere pittance. The youth 
obtained his bachelor's degree and left the univer- 
sity. During some time, the humble dwelling to 
which his widowed mother had retired was his home. 
He was now in his twenty -first year; it was neces- 
sary that he should do something, and his education 
seemed to have fitted him to do nothing but to dress 
himself in gaudy colors, of which he was as fond as 
a magpie, to take a hand at cards, to sing Irish airs, 
to play the flute, to angle in summer, and to tell ghost 
stories by the fire in winter. He tried five or six 
professions in turn without success. He applied for 
ordination; but, as he applied in scarlet clothes, he 
was speedily turned out of the episcopal palace.^ He 
then became tutor in an opulent family, but soon 
quitted his situation in consequence of a dispute 
about play. Then he determined to emigrate to 
America. His relations, with much satisfaction, saw 
him set out for Cork on a good horse, with thirty 
pounds in his pocket. But in six weeks he came 
back on a miserable hack without a penny, and in- 
formed his mother that the ship in which he had 
taken his passage, having got a fair wind while he 
was at a party of pleasure, had sailed without him.* 

1 His name was Wilder. 2 j^ 1747. ^ of Elphin. 

* Compare with the adventures of Moses in The Vicar of 
Wakefield. 



74 MACAULAY. 

Then he resolved to study the law. A generous kins- 
man 1 advanced fifty pounds. With this sum Gold- 
smith went to Dublin, was enticed into a gaming- 
house, and lost every shilling. He then thought of 
medicine. A small purse was made up, and in his 
twenty-fourth year he was sent to Edinburgh. ^ At 
Edinburgh he passed eighteen months in nominal 
attendance on lectures, and picked up some superfi- 
cial information about chemistry and natural history. 
Thence he went to Leyden, still pretending to study 
physic. He left that celebrated university — the third 
university at which he had resided — in his twenty- 
seventh year, without a degree, with the merest smat- 
tering of medical knowledge, and with no j^roperty 
but his clothes and his flute. His flute, however, 
proved a useful friend. He rambled on foot through 
Flanders, France, and Switzerland, playing tunes 
which everywhere set the peasantry dancing, and 
which often procured for him a supper and a bed. 
He wandered as far as Italy. His musical perform- 
ances, indeed, were not to the taste of the Italians, 
but he contrived to live on the alms which he obtained 
at the gates of convents. It should, however, be 
observed, that the stories which he told about this 
part of his life ought to be received with great cau- 
tion, for strict veracity was never one of his virtues; 
and a man who is ordinarily inaccurate in narration 
is likely to be more than ordinarily inaccurate when 
he talks about his own travels. Goldsmith, indeed, 
was so regardless of truth as to assert in print that 
he was present at a most interesting conversation be- 

1 His uncle by marriage, Rev. Thomas Contarine. 

2 The university of that city, noted for its school of medical 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 75 

tween Voltaire and Fontenelle,^ and that this conver- 
sation took place at Paris. Now it is certain that 
Voltaire never was within a hundred leagues of Paris 
during the whole time which Goldsmith passed on the 
Continent. 

In 1756 the wanderer landed at Dover, without a 
shilling, without a friend, and without a calling. He 
had, indeed, if his own unsupported evidence 'may be 
trusted, obtained from the University of Padua a 
doctor's degree; but this dignity proved utterly use- 
less to him. In England his flute was not in request; 
there were no convents; and he was forced to have 
recourse to a series of desiDerate expedients. He 
turned strolling player, but his face and figure were 
ill suited to the boards even of the humblest thea- 
tre. He pounded drugs and ran about London with 
phials for charitable chemists. He joined a swarm of 
beggars which made its nest in Axe Yard. He was 
for a time usher ^ of a school, and felt the miseries 
and humiliations of this situation so keenly that he 
thought it a j^romotion to be permitted to earn his 
bread as a bookseller's hack; but he soon found the 
new yoke more galling than the old one, and was 
glad to become an usher again. He obtained a 
medical appointment in the service of the East India 
Company, but the appointment was speedily revoked. 
Why it was revoked we are not told. The subject 
was one on which he never liked to talk. It is prob- 
able that he was incompetent to perform the duties of 
the i)lace. Then he presented himself at Surgeons' 

^ Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657-1757), a noted 
French writer. 

^ That is, assistant master. 



76 MACAULAY. 

HalP for examination as mate to a naval hospital. 
Even to so humble a post lie was found unequal. By 
this time the schoolmaster whom he had served for 
a morsel of food and the third part of a bed was no 
more. Nothing remained but to return to the lowest 
drudgery of literature. Goldsmith took a garret in 
a miserable court, to which he had to climb from 
the brink of Fleet Ditch by a dizzy ladder of flag- 
stones called Breakneck Steps. The court and the 
ascent have long disappeared,^ but old Londoners 
well remember both. Here, at thirty, the unlucky 
adventurer sat down to toil like a galley-slave. 

In the succeeding six years he sent to the press 
some things which have survived, and many which 
have perished. He produced articles for reviews,^ 
magazines, and newspapers; children's books, which, 
bound in gilt paper and adorned with hideous wood- 
cuts, appeared in the window of the once far-famed 
shop at the corner of St. Paul's Churchyard;^ "An 
Inquiry into the State of Polite Learning in Europe," 
which, though of little or no value, is still reprinted 
among his works; a "Life of Beau Nash," which is 
not reprinted,^ though it well deserves to be so; a 
superficial and incorrect but very readable "History 
of England," in a series of letters purporting to be 

^ That is, the buildings of the Royal College of Surgeons, 
which trains and examines candidates for the medical profes- 
sion. 

2 The accuracy of this statement has been questioned. 

3 Mainly for The Monthly Review, started in 1749 by the book- 
seller Griffiths. 

^ It was kept by John Newbery. 

^ Richard Nash (1674-1761) was a celebrated leader of fash- 
ion, a predecessor of " Beau " Brummel. The work has been 
reprinted. 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 11 

addressed by a nobleman to his son ; and some very 
lively and amusing "Sketches of London Society," 
in a series of letters purporting to be addressed by a 
Chinese traveler to his friends.^ All these works were 
anonymous, but some of them were well known to be 
Goldsmith's; and he gradually rose in the estimation 
of the booksellers for whom he drudged. He was, 
indeed, emphatically a popular writer. For accurate 
research or grave disquisition he was not well quali- 
fied by nature or by education. He knew nothing 
accurately : his reading had been desultory, nor had 
he meditated deeply on what he had read. He had 
seen much of the world; but he had noticed and 
retained little more of what he had seen than some 
grotesque incidents and characters which happened 
to strike his fancy. But, though his mind was very 
scantily stored with materials, he used what materials 
he had in such a way as to produce a wonderful effect. 
There have been many greater writers, but perhaps 
no writer was ever more uniformly agreeable. His 
style was always pure and easy, and, on proper occa- 
sions, pointed and energetic. His narratives were 
always amusing; his descriptions always ^picturesque ; 
his humor rich and joyous, yet not without an occa- 
sional tinge of amiable sadness. About everything 
that he wrote, serious or sportive, there was a certain 
natural grace and decorum hardly to be expected 
from a man a great part of whose life had been passed 
among thieves and beggars, street-walkers and merry- 
andrews, in those squalid dens which are the reproach 
of great capitals. 

^ 111 imitation of Montesquieu's celebrated Persian Letters. 
Goldsmith's letters appeared in The Public Ledger for 1760, and 
afterwards formed his well-known Citizen of the World, 



78 MAC A UL AY. 

As his name gradually became known, tlie circle 
of his acquaintance widened. He was introduced to 
Johnson, who was then considered as the first of liv- 
ing English writers; to Keynolds, the first of Eng- 
lish painters ; and to Burke, who had not yet entered 
Parliament, but had distinguished himself greatly by 
his writings and by the eloquence of his conversation. 
With these eminent men Goldsmith became intimate. 
In 1763 he was one of the nine original members of 
that celebrated fraternity which has sometimes been 
called the Literary Club, but which has always dis- 
claimed that epithet, and still glories in the simple 
name of "The Club."i 

By this time Goldsmith had quitted his miserable 
dwelling at the top of Breakneck Steps, and had 
taken chambers in the more civilized region of the 
Inns of Court. But he was still often reduced to 
pitiable shifts. Towards the close of 1764 his rent 
was so long in arrear that his landlady one morning 
called in the help of a sheriff's officer. The debtor, in 
great perplexity, dispatched a messenger to Johnson ; 
and Johnson, always friendly though often surly, 
sent back the messenger with a guinea, and promised 
to follow speedily. He came, and found that Gold- 
smith had changed the guinea, and was railing at the 
landlady over a bottle of Madeira. Johnson put the 
cork into the bottle, and entreated his friend to con- 
sider calmly how money was to be procured. Gold- 
smith said that he had a novel ready for the press. 
Johnson glanced at the manuscript, saw that there 
were good things in it, took it to a bookseller, sold it 
for sixty pounds, and soon returned with the money. 
The rent was paid, and the sheriff's officer withdrew. 

1 See the essay on Jolinson, page 44, note 2, and page 45, note 1. 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 79 

According to one story, Goklsniitli gave liis landlady 
a sharp reprimand for lier treatment of him ; accord- 
ing to another, he insisted on her joining him in a 
bowl of punch. Both stories are probably true. The 
novel which was thus ushered into the world was 
"The Vicar of Wakefield." 

But before "The Vicar of Wakefield"^ appeared 
in print, came the great crisis of Goldsmith's liter- 
ary life. In Christmas week, 1764, he published a 
poem entitled "The Traveller." It was the first work 
to which he had put his name, and it at once raised 
him to the rank of a legitimate English classic. The 
opinion of the most skilful critics was, that nothing 
finer had appeared in verse since the fourth book of 
"The Dunciad."! In one respect, "The Traveller" 
differs from all Goldsmith's other writings. In gen- 
eral his designs were bad antl his execution good. 
In "The Traveller" the execution, though deserving 
of much praise, is far inferior to the design. No 
philosophical poem, ancient or modern, has a plan so 
noble, and at the same time so simple. An English 
wanderer, seated on a crag among the Alps, near the 
point where three great countries meet, looks down 
on the boundless prospect, reviews his long pilgrim- 
age, recalls the varieties of scenery, of climate, of 
government, of religion, of national character, which 
he has observed, and comes to the conclusion, just or 
unjust, that our happiness depends little on political 
institutions, and much on the temper and regulation 
of our minds. 

While the fourth edition of "The Traveller " was on 
the counters of the booksellers, "The Vicar of Wake- 
field" appeared, and rapidly obtained a popularity 
1 Published in March, 1742, three years before Pope's death. 



80 MA CAUL AY. 

wliicli has lasted down to our own time, and which is 
likely to last as long as our language. The fable is, 
indeed, one of the worst that ever was constructed. 
It wants not merely that probability which ought to 
be found in a tale of common English life, but that 
consistency which ought to be found even in the wild- 
est fiction about witches, giants, and fairies. But 
the earlier chapters have all the sweetness of pasto- 
ral poetry, together with all the vivacity of comedy. 
Moses and his spectacles, the Vicar and his mono- 
gamy, the Sharper and his cosmogony, the Squire 
proving from Aristotle that relatives are related, 
Olivia preparing herself for the arduous task of con- 
verting a rakish lover by studying the controversy 
between Robinson Crusoe and Friday, the great ladies 
with their scandal about Sir Tomkyn's amours and 
Dr. Burdock's verses, and Mr. Burchell with his 
"Fudofe!" have caused as much harmless mirth as 
has ever been caused by matter packed into so small 
a number of pages. The latter part of the tale is 
unworthy of the beginning. As we approach the 
catastrophe, the absurdities lie thicker and thicker, 
and the gleams of pleasantry become rarer and rarer. ^ 
The success which had attended Goldsmith as a 
novelist emboldened him to try his fortune as a dra- 
matist. He wrote "The Good-natured Man," a piece 
which had a worse fate than it deserved. Garrick 
refused to produce it at Drury Lane. It was acted 
at Co vent Garden in 1768, but was coldly received. 
The author, however, cleared by his benefit nights, 
and by the sale of the copyright, not less than five 

1 The classic account of the sale of the Vicar given above 
must be taken with many allowances. See Dobson's Gold- 
smith. 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 81 

hundred pounds, — five times as much as he had made 
by "The Traveller" and "The Vicar of Wakefield" 
together. The plot of "The Good-natured Man" is, 
like almost all Goldsmith's plots, very ill-constructed. 
But some passages are exquisitely ludicrous, — much 
more ludicrous, indeed, than suited the taste of the 
town at that time. A canting, mawkish play, entitled 
"False Delicacy,"^ had just had an immense run. 
Sentimentality was all the mode. During some years, 
more tears were shed at comedies than at tragedies ; 
and a pleasantry which moved the audience to any- 
thing more than a grave smile was reprobated as low. 
It is not strange, therefore, that the very best scene 
in "The Good-natured Man" — that in which Miss 
Richland finds her lover attended by the bailiff and 
the bailiff 's follower in full court-dresses — should have 
been mercilessly hissed, and should have been omitted 
after the first night. 

In 1770 appeared "The Deserted Village." In 
mere diction and versification, this celebrated poem 
is fully equal, perhaps superior, to "The Traveller;" 
and it is generally preferred to "The Traveller" by 
that large class of readers who think, with Bayes in 
"The Rehearsal,"^ that the only use of a plan is to 
bring in fine things. More discerning judges, how- 
ever, while they admire the beauty of the details, are 
shocked by one unpardonable fault which pervades 
the whole. The fault which we mean is not that 

1 By Hugh Kelly (1739-1777), a small author with whom 
Goldsmith's relations were not pleasant. 

2 A satiric play hrought out in 1672 by George Villiers, Duke 
of Buckingham (1627-1788), It was chiefly an attack on Dryden, 
whom the hero, Bayes, was supposed to personate. It is often 
referred to but not much read at present. 



82 MA CAUL AY. 

theory about wealth and luxury which has so often 
been censured by political economists. ^ The theory 
is indeed false; but the poem, considered merely as a 
poem, is not necessarily the worse on that account. 
The finest poem in the Latin language — indeed, the 
finest didactic poem in any language — was written in 
defense of the silliest and meanest of all systems of 
natural and moral philosophy. ^ A poet may easily be 
pardoned for reasoning ill, but he cannot be pardoned 
for describing ill; for observing the world in which 
he lives so carelessly that his portraits bear no re- 
semblance to the originals; for exhibiting as copies - 
from real life monstrous combinations of things wdiich 
never were, and never could be, found together. 
What would be thought of a painter wdio should mix 
August and January in one landscape, — who should 
introduce a frozen river into a harvest scene ? Would 
it be a sufficient defense of such a picture to say that 
every part was exquisitely colored; that the green 
hedges, the apple-trees loaded with fruit, the wagons 
reeling under the yellow sheaves, and the sunburnt 
reapers wiping their foreheads, were very fine; and 
that the ice and the boys sliding were also very fine ? 
To such a picture "The Deserted Village" bears a 
great resemblance. It is made up of incongruous 
parts. The village in its happy days is a true Eng- 
lish village. The village in its decay is an Irish vil- 
lage. The felicity and the misery which Goldsmith 
has brought close together belong to two different 
countries, and to two different stages in the progress 
of society. He had assuredly never seen in his native 

1 See tlie concluding paragraphs of the poem. 

2 The De Rerum Natura of Lucretius, which is based on the 
philosophy of Epicurus, somewhat caricatured by Macaulay. 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 83 

island such a rural j^aradise, such a seat of plenty, 
content, and tranquillity, as his Auburn. He had 
assuredly never seen in England all the inhabitants 
of such a paradise turned out of their homes in one 
day, and forced to emigrate in a body to America. 
The hamlet he had probably seen in Kent; the eject- 
ment he had probably seen in Munster; but by join- 
ing the two, he has produced something which never 
was and never will be seen in any part of the world. 

In 1773 Goldsmith tried his chance at Covent 
Garden with a second play, "She Stoops to Conquer." 
The manager 1 was not without great difficulty in- 
duced to bring this piece out. The sentimental com- 
edy still reigned, and Goldsmith's comedies were not 
sentimental. "The Good-natured Man" had been 
too funny to succeed ; yet the mirth of " The Good- 
natured Man" was sober when compared with the 
rich drollery of "She Stoops to Conquer," which is, in 
truth, an incomparable farce in five acts. On this 
occasion, however, genius triumphed. Pit, boxes, 
and galleries were in a constant roar of laughter. If 
any bigoted admirer of Kelly and Cumberland ^ ven- 
tured to hiss or groan, he was speedily silenced by 
a general cry of "Turn him out! " or "Throw him 
over!" Two generations have since confirmed the 
verdict which was pronounced on that night. 

While Goldsmith was writing "The Deserted Vil- 

1 George Colman the Elder (1733 7-1794:), himself a dramatist, 
and so harder to please. 

2 Richard Cumberland (1732-1811), a successful but now 
nearly forgotten playwright. The West - Indian is his best 
known work. In his Memoirs he gives an amusing account of 
how he, with some of Goldsmith's other friends, headed by Dr. 
Johnson, went to the theatre prepared to make the play go 
through by their applause. 



84 MACAULAY. 

lage " and "She Stoops to Conquer," he was employed 
on works of a very different kind, — works from which 
he derived little reputation, but much profit. He com- 
piled for the use of schools a "History of Rome," 
by which he made three hundred pounds; a "History 
of England," by which he made six hundred pounds; 
a "History of Greece," for which he received two 
hundred and fifty pounds; a "Natural History," for 
which the booksellers covenanted to pay him eight 
hundred guineas. These works he produced without 
any elaborate research, by merely selecting, abridg- 
ing, and translating into his own clear, pure, and 
flowing language what he found in books well known 
to the world, but too bulky or too dry for boys and 
girls. He committed some strange blunders, for he 
knew nothing with accuracy. Thus, in his "History 
of England," he tells us that Naseby is in Yorkshire; ^ 
nor did he correct this mistake when the book was 
reprinted. He was very nearly hoaxed ^ into putting 
into the "History of Greece" an account of a battle 
between Alexander the Great and Montezuma. In 
his "Animated Nature" he relates, with faith and 
with perfect gravity, all the most absurd lies which 
he could find in books of travels about gigantic Pata- 
gonians, monkeys that preach sermons, nightingales 
that repeat long conversations. "If he can tell a 
horse from a cow," says Johnson, "that is the extent 
of his knowledge of zoology." How little Goldsmith 
was qualified to write about the physical sciences is 
sufficiently proved by two anecdotes. He on one 
occasion denied that the sun is longer in the northern 
than in the southern signs. It was vain to cite the 

1 It is in Northamptonshire. 

2 By Gibbon. 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 85 

authority of Maupertuis.^ " Maupertuis I " he cried; 
"I understand those matters better than Maupertuis." 
On another occasion he, in defiance of the evidence 
of his own senses, maintained obstinately, and even 
angrily, that he chewed his dinner by moving his 
uj)]3er jaw. 

Yet, ignorant as Goldsmith was, few writers have 
done more to make the first steps in the laborious 
road to knowledge easy and pleasant. His compila- 
tions are widely distinguished from the compilations 
of ordinary book-makers. He was a great, perhaps 
an unequaled, master of the arts of selection and con- 
densation. In these respects his histories of Rome 
and of England, and still more his own abridgments 
of these histories, well deserve to be studied. In 
general nothing is less attractive than an epitome, 
but the epitomes of Goldsmith, even when most con- 
cise, are always amusing; and to read them is con- 
sidered by intelligent children, not as a task, but as 
a pleasure. 

Goldsmith might now be considered as a prosperous 
man. He had the means of living in comfort, and 
even in what, to one who had so often slept in barns 
and on bulks, must have been luxury. His fame was 
great, and was constantly rising. He lived in what 
was intellectually far the best society of the kingdom, 
— in a society in which no talent or accomplishment 
was wanting, and in which the art of conversation 
was cultivated with splendid success. There probably 
were never four talkers more admirable in four differ- 
ent ways than Johnson, Burke, Beauclerk, and Gar- 
rick; and Goldsmith was on terms of intimacy with 

^ Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759), a noted 
French mathematician and astronomer. 



86 MACAULAY. 

all the four. He aspired to share in their colloquial 
renown, but never was ambition more unfortunate. 
It may seem strange that a man who wrote with so 
much perspicuity, vivacity, and grace should have 
been, whenever he took a part in conversation, an 
empty, noisy, blundering rattle. But on this point 
the evidence is overwhelming. So extraordinary was 
the contrast between Goldsmith's published works 
and the silly things which he said, that Horace Wal- 
pole described him as an inspired idiot. "Noll," 
said Garrick, "wrote like an angel and talked like 
poor PoU."^ Chamier declared that it was a hard 
exercise of faith to believe that so foolish a chatterer 
could have really written "The Traveller." Even 
Boswell could say, with contemptuous compassion, 
that he liked very well to hear honest Goldsmith run 
on. "Yes, sir," said Johnson, "but he should not 
like to hear himself." Minds differ as rivers differ. 
There are transparent and sparkling rivers from 
which it is delightful to drink as they flow; to such 
rivers the minds of such men as Burke and Johnson 
may be compared. But there are rivers of which the 
water when first drawn is turbid and noisome, but 
becomes pellucid as crystal and delicious to the taste 
if it be suffered to stand till it has deposited a sedi- 
ment ; and such a river is a type of the mind of Gold- 
smith. His first thoughts on every subject were 
confused even to absurdity, but they required only a 
little time to work themselves clear. When he wrote, 
they had that time, and therefore his readers pro- 
nounced him a man of genius; but when he talked, 
he talked nonsense, and made himself the laughing- 
stock of his hearers. He was painfully sensible of 
1 See page 90, note. 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 87 

his inferiority in conversation; lie felt every failure 
keenly; yet lie liad not sufficient judgment and self- 
command to hold his tongue. His animal spirits and 
vanity were always impelling him to try to do the one 
thing which he could not do. After every attempt, 
he felt that he had exposed himself, and writhed with 
shame and vexation; yet the next moment he began 

again. 

His associates seem to have regarded hmi with 
kindness, which, in spite of their admiration of his 
writings, was not unmixed with contempt. In truth, 
there was in his character much to love, but very 
little to respect. His heart was soft, even to weak- 
ness; he was so generous that he quite forgot to be 
just; he forgave injuries so readily that he might be 
said'to invite them; and was so liberal to beggars that 
he had nothing left for his tailor and his butcher. 
He was vain, sensual, frivolous, profuse, improvident. 
One vice of a darker shade was imputed to him, envy. 
But there is not the least reason to believe that this 
bad passion, though it sometimes made him wince 
and utter fretful exclamations, ever impelled him to 
injure by wicked arts the reputation of any of his 
rivals. The truth probably is, that he was not more 
envious, but merely less prudent, than his neighbors. 
His heart was on his lips. All those small jealousies 
which are but too common among men of letters, 
but which a man of letters who is also a man of the 
world does his best to conceal, Goldsmith avowed with 
the simplicity of a child. When he was envious, in- 
stead of affecting indifference, instead of damning 
with faint praise, instead of doing injuries slyly and 
in the dark, he told everybody that he was envious. 



88 MACAULAY. 

"Do not, pray do not, talk of Johnson in such terms," 
he said to Boswell; "you harrow up my very soul." 
George Steevens ^ and Cumberland were men far too 
cunning to say such a thing. They would have 
echoed the praises of the man whom they envied, and 
then have sent to the newspapers anonymous libels 
upon him. Both what was good and what was bad 
in Goldsmith's character was to his associates a per- 
fect security that he would never commit such vil- 
lany. He was neither ill-natured enough, nor long- 
headed enough, to be guilty of any malicious act which 
required contrivance and disguise. 

Goldsmith has sometimes been represented as a 
man of genius, cruelly treated by the world, and 
doomed to struggle with difficulties which at last broke 
his heart. But no representation can be more remote 
from the truth. He did, indeed, go through much 
sharp misery before he had done anything consider- 
able in literature. But after his name had appeared 
on the title-page of "The Traveller," he had none but 
himself to blame for his distresses. His average in- 
come during the last scA^en years of his life certainly 
exceeded four hundred pounds a year, and four hun- 
dred pounds a year ranked among the incomes of that 
day at least as high as eight hundred pounds a year 
would rank at present. A single man living in the 
Temple with four hundred pounds a year might then 
be called opulent. Not one in ten of the young gen- 
tlemen of good families who were studying the law 
there had so much. But all the wealth which Lord 
Clive^ had brought from Bengal, and Sir Lawrence 

^ A well-known Shakespearean scholar (1736-1800). 
2 For Robert, Lord Clive (1725-1774), see Macaulay's great 
essay; Sir Lawrence Dundas seems to have been a contractor to 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 89 

Dundas from Germany, joined together, would not 
have sufficed for Goldsmith. He spent twice as 
much as he had. He wore fine clothes, gave dinners 
of several courses, paid court to venal beauties. He 
had also, it should be remembered to the honor of his 
heart though not of his head, a guinea, or five, or 
ten, according to the state of his purse, ready for 
any tale of distress, true or false. But it was not in 
dress or feasting, in promiscuous amours or promis- 
cuous charities, that his chief expense lay. He had 
been from boyhood a gambler, and at once the most 
sanguine and the most unskilful of gamblers. For 
a time he put off the day of inevitable ruin by tempo- 
rary expedients. He obtained advances from book- 
sellers by promising to execute works which he never 
began. But at length this source of supply failed. 
He owed more than two thousand pounds, and he 
saw no hope of extrication from his embarrassments. 
His spirits and health gave way. He was attacked 
by a nervous fever, which he thought himself compe- 
tent to treat. It would have been happy for him 
if his medical skill had been appreciated as justly 
by himself as by others. Notwithstanding the degree 
which he pretended to have received at Padua, he 
could procure no patients. ''I do not practice," he 
once said; "I make it a rule to prescribe only for 
my friends." "Pray, dear Doctor," said Beauclerk, 
"alter your rule, and prescribe only for your ene- 
mies." Goldsmith now, in spite of this excellent 
advice, prescribed for himself. The remedy aggra- 
vated the malady. The sick man was induced to call 
in real physicians, and they at one time imagined 

the army in Germany from 1748 to 1759, who amassed great 
wealth and was knighted in 1762, dying in 1781 (?). 



90 MA CAUL AY. 

that they had cured the disease. Still his weakness 
and restlessness continued. He could get no sleep; 
he could take no food. "You are worse," said one 
of his medical attendants, "than you should be from 
the degree of fever which you have. Is your mind 
at ease?" "No, it is not," were the last recorded 
words of Oliver Goldsmith. He died on the 3d of 
April, 1774, in his forty-sixth year. He was laid 
in the churchyard of the Temple ; but the spot was 
not marked by any inscription, and is now forgotten. 
The coffin was followed by Burke and Reynolds. 
Both these great men were sincere mourners. Burke, 
when he heard of Goldsmith's death, had burst into 
a flood of tears. Reynolds had been so much moved 
by the news that he had flung aside his brush and 
palette for the day. 

A short time after Goldsmith's death, a little poem 
appeared, which will, as long as our language lasts, 
associate the names of his two illustrious friends with 
his own. It has already been mentioned that he 
sometimes felt keenly the sarcasm which his wild, 
blundering talk brought upon him. He was, not 
long before his last illness, provoked into retaliating.^ 
He wisely betook himself to his pen, and at that 
weapon he proved himself a match for all his assail- 
ants together. Within a small comj^ass he drew with 
a singularly easy and vigorous pencil the characters 

1 In February, 1774, a party of his friends, dining at the St. 
James coffee-house without him, undertook to write some 
humorous epitaphs on Goldsmith. Garriek contributed the 

couplet : — 

" Here lies Nolly Goldsmith, for shortness called Noll, 
Who wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll." 

Goldsmith's delightful Retaliation was the outcome of the inci- 
dent. 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 91 

of nine or ten of liis intimate associates. Though 
this little work did not receive his last touches, it 
must always be regarded as a masterpiece. It is 
impossible, however, not to wish that four or five 
likenesses which have no interest for posterity were 
wanting to that noble gallery, and that their places 
were supplied by sketches of Johnson and Gibbon as 
happy and vivid as the sketches of Burke and Gar- 
rick. 

Some of Goldsmith's friends and admirers honored 
him with a cenotaph in Westminster Abbey. NoUe- 
kens ^ was the sculptor, and Johnson wrote the in- 
scription. It is much to be lamented that Johnson 
did not leave to posterity a more durable and a more 
valuable memorial of his friend. A life of Gold- 
smith would have been an inestimable addition to the 
"Lives of the Poets." No man appreciated Gold- 
smith's writings more justty than Johnson; no man 
was better acquainted with Goldsmith's character and 
habits ; and no man was more competent to delineate 
with truth and spirit the peculiarities of a mind in 
which great powers were found in company with great 
weaknesses. But the list of poets to Vvhose works 
Johnson was requested by the booksellers to furnish 
prefaces ended with Lyttelton,^ who died in 1773. 
The line seems to have been drawn expressly for the 
purpose of excluding the person v/hose portrait would 
have most fitly closed the series. Goldsmith, how- 
ever, has been fortunate in his biographers. Within 
a few years his life has been written by Mr. Prior, ^ 

1 Joseph Nollekens (1737-1823). 

'^ George, Lord Lyttelton (1709-1773), a better prose writer 
than poet. 

3 Mr. (afterwards Sir) James Prior (1790?-1869). 



92 MACAULAY. 

by Mr. Washington Irving, and by Mr. Forster.^ 
The diligence of Mr. Prior deserves great praise ; the 
style of Mr. Washington Irving is always pleasing; 
but the highest place must in justice be assigned to 
the eminently interesting work of Mr. Forster. 

1 John Forster (1812-1876), au indefatigable biographer. 
He wrote lives of Landor and Dickens among others. His 
Goldsmith appeared in 1848. 



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